Ivy Recruiting - What support can a coach provide?

Athletic Recruits
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Let’s at least be honest, there are serious commercial interests in these showcases/camps.

What family, especially those with deeper financial resources, would not go to a summer showcase/camp if an Ivy/Top D1 program “commitment” was a possible outcome?

The attendance at these camps and showcases get bigger every year, yet the early “commitments” offered are at best non-binding. Most parents and their students don’t understand the NCAA and Ivy rules, guidelines or timelines. Everyone is just blinded by the potential bragging rights. In my opinion this is a sad reflection on our society.

Why do coaches offer these non-binding commitments as early as freshman/sophomore year? Early recruitment potential means more students will attend these camps/showcases for more years. It is an incredible windfall for the coaches. Will a student who “commits” early tell a coach “since I am already in, I won’t be coming to your camp for the next two years”? I think not.

Experienced coaches probably can tell which students they can get thru the admissions process. It is in their interests to pick students they can actually get thru admissions, eventhough an actual admissions officer won’t see these “recruits” until July before senior year. When the early recruit does make it thru admissions, the benefits of attending these camps/showcases becomes tangible to many. It is a marketing tool.

Students with affluent, educated parents, and who may attend feeder high schools (perhaps with older siblings who are already in top programs), generally are safe players to commit to. While these commitments are non-binding, they are safe guesses and worth taking for the marketing benefits these recruits have on camp/showcase attendance. These early recruits are generally in a good position for admission unless the coach leaves the school, or if injury or a better player comes along.

I often wonder why coaches want to fill their rosters so early (especially for boys) as kids mature at different rates. If I were a coach, I would want someone who peaks athletically in college rather than someone who peaks in sophomore year of HS. There is also the issue of injury, or overlooking other players who peak later in their HS careers. I fear that college coaches may be letting commercial interests overrule better judgment.

In our case, my son was not considered a serious/recruitable athlete in his sophomore year because he still played soccer in addition to his primary sport. It wasn’t until late junior year that he focused on his primary sport and became nationally accomplished. Fortunately in his sport, all the teams/coaches adhere to the Ivy/NCAA guidelines and only make binding commitments, after July 1st before senior year.

Another more philosophical question is, what HS freshman, sophomore, or even junior is knowledgeable or mature enough to know what they want out of their college experience so early? Other than the marquee value of the athletic programs, what about the other aspects of achieving the right college fit? Large school vs small, urban vs rural, university vs college, etc. Making such an important life decision so early just on the basis of a sports program? I fear many families may be intoxicated by the bragging rights and making important life decisions prematurely.

With all the CC expertise participating on this thread, I don’t want the experts to lose sight of the purpose of this topic, to help less-experienced, less-informed students and their families navigate the Ivy League athletic recruitment landscape.

To me, the most important thing is for families to have the framework to separate the marketing and hype from reality. As Simon & Garfunkel said, “a man hear what he want to hear and disregards the rest” and I think this is especially true in early recruiting.

My biggest fear is for a family who are not aware of the Ivy rules/guidelines/timelines who interpret a coaches early enthusiasm for something more than a non-binding commitment and, as a consequence, stops asking questions or considering all options. Anecdotes of early recruiting success are well documented on CC, however I would imagine those who have been burned are less willing to share.

I can think of several examples of students bragging of early recruitment well before senior year whose families were not at all versed in the vocabulary of LL, preread, etc. or aware of the specific timelines.

Becoming a cautionary tale is the worst possible outcome for any aspiring Ivy athlete. Spiking the ball before actually crossed the goal line always makes the highlight reel on SportsCenter.

My advice to families with recruitable athletes of any age is learn the official rules and process, and to keep all lines of communication open with all interested coaches/programs until a LL is in the mail.

In my opinion, anything before the LL is just good marketing.

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All commitments are non-binding until senior year and NLI signing. An Ivy commitment is no more or less binding than one to Big State school or one of the elite privates - all non-binding. Are the Ivy coaches not making any contact, any commitment before senior year? No, they are having contact and making non-binding offers. How else would these ‘recruits’ be posting and talking about it? No one would be so bold as to post she was a Yale recruit without having some indication from the coach that she going to play at Yale.

Of course the recruiting pool is smaller for the Ivy coach. With only freshmen and sophomore years to base it on, perhaps an SAT or PSAT to look at, the coaches have to tread lightly. The coaches at Hopkins, Duke and Northwestern may be able to get one or two recruits through with blemishes on their records, and the big publics can pretty much get anyone through who can qualify with the NCAA. I know two guys who went to Virginia who would not have been Ivy eligible even with lots of tutoring and test prep, so those families never considered it and never tried for those schools. I know one who is going through the process now and has been recruited by Air Force. He and his family know it may not work out because of his grades.

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From Bob Scalise, Harvard’s AD:

This statement is consistent with the Ivy League rules:

Also from Bob Scalise, Harvard’s AD:

When an Ivy League coach makes a commitment to fully support a recruited athlete during the admission process no Ivy League rules are violated. This support would be conditional on the recruit maintaining their GPA within a reasonable range and making a minimum ACT/SAT score to be above the Academic Index (which is based on GPA and test scores) floor of 176. For some sports this support is given as early as sophomore year and the support appears to be reliable (but also “occasionally prone to failure”):

The coach is also expected to maintain a team average AI above a given level based on the average AI of the general student body.

Because the AI is calculated from a four year moving average for all athletes it is not necessary to precisely predict the ACT/SAT scores for an individual athlete, it is only necessary that a reasonable prediction of junior and senior year scores is made based on 8th grade, freshman and sophomore PSAT/SAT/ACT scores. So long as the average increase in expected scores is maintained over a 4 year rolling average the coach can maintain his team AI. The coach can also maintain the team AI by building in an AI cushion or by keeping open one senior slot for a high AI player if needed.

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After reading through this whole thread, I can only add that there is no question that ‘soft’ support does exist, and can be very helpful for an already qualified applicant. I am aware of 3 student-athletes that were very good in their sport, had received other D1/D3 offers, but not offered an Ivy ‘slot’ for one reason or the other (not grades or test scores though). With each of them, at least one Ivy coach went out of their way to contact them and stay in touch with them in the latter part of their junior year, that summer, and the fall of their senior year. They were actually very up front about what they could and could not do, and stated there would be no formal LL. But, they emphasized that they would roster the athlete upon admission, should that occur. In fall of their senior year, they asked those students to call them if they were still interested and planned on applying EA or ED. They then contacted the student’s coaches and asked them for a short summary regarding the student, both on and of the field, so they could use this for a letter of support to the admissions committee. All 3 were subsequently accepted early and were rostered on their Ivy team. Did the coaches actually write a letter? I believe so. Did it make a substantial difference and was it a tip in admissions? I think so. Would they have gotten in anyway without any contact with the coaches? I don’t know.

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@fenwaypark-- thanks for the update. No worries. This is a good discussion. I’ll stand by my quote, but I don’t see it as being substantively different than what ohiodad espouses. Truly there are no guarantees until you’re admitted or at least have a LL in your hand. The stuff that happens “early” isn’t promised or guaranteed, but it does seem to, by and large, work out. A recruit still must adhere to Ivy League standards, get thru pre-reads, etc. It all requires a bit of a leap of faith. I know we didn’t breathe easy until our daughter got her LL, but we were advised to trust in this process by a couple of Princeton ( not the school my kid goes to) coaches that we have connections to. I am certain that everything being done today, even with these first semester 10th graders announcing their commitment to the Ivy League school application process, remains legal.

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@swimkidsdad, I don’t think anyone disagrees with what you wrote in your last post. I won’t speak for @superdomestique, but personally I would not counsel a kid to “take themselves off the market” as it where based only on a conditional offer. If the coach says get an x on the ACT and then I will support you, I would not counsel my kid to announce he was “committed” until he in fact fulfilled the conditions of the offer. I don’t see this is a terribly controversial position, but maybe it is.

Speaking personally, and going back to the older thread, my struggle is with the idea that classes are being “completed” in 9th and 10th grade. I just don’t know how that is possible without having data that is just not available at that point.

More generally, and at the risk of being called condescending again, it is not like early recruiting is a new thing, or only effects women’s lax and soccer. Basketball has been struggling with this for a decade or more on all levels. Seems to me you can either do what the Ivy does, and maybe direct some of your lower AI slots towards sports that you favor, thus giving you more flexibility to give conditional support to younger players even though you know you are going to lose some who can get a degree of certainty from Duke or North Carolina say or you can cede control of certain admissions slots to the athletic department, the way, for example, Notre Dame does for revenue sports. I don’t know what the other options are.

At the end of the day though, I assume if the Ivys are recruiting this early, then the other lax schools are doing the same thing, and if a kid doesn’t pass a pre read at Cornell, then he or she is also shut out of schollies at Duke or JHU or wherever. Not sure how you protect against that if you are talking about the “top” players, without giving up the admissions slots. My opinion is that since the Ivy hasn’t taken that step with the “bigger” sports, it is not likely to do that for smaller sports.

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CDK, here is what I have trouble understanding.

Each Ivy has a limit on the number of slots–either the League limit or a lesser limit self-imposed by the school. Say the coach in your example had 10 slots. The coach supported 10 kids for those slots. Then in addition to that, the coach provided soft support to one or more others who were admitted. Doesn’t that get the coach over the limit, even if fractionally, if “soft” support = 1/2 or 1/3 or whatever, of regular support?

I suppose one answer might be that if these “fractions” do not get the school over the Ivy cap, no problem at that level. And if the “fractions” get the school over its self-imposed lesser limit, well, what happens in-house stays in-house.

I had been convinced that soft support would “really undermine the whole process”, as stated by another poster, and as my own experience demonstrated. Now I am back on the fence.

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@doubtful, thanks for confirming your views.

For me this is the key point for any folks–whether it is a whole lot of people or not, I do not know–who believe that there is something not entirely above board going on about Ivy early commitments.

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But they can get athletic scholarships at Duke and Hopkins so all is not lost if they don’t make the pre-read cut at Cornell. Money isn’t always a factor.

I hope the changes are adopted by the NCAA for women’ lax that limits contact and commitments until junior year. The coaches want that, but everyone needs to be using the same rules and as of right now, this early committing by sophomores is more common than not in the big programs, so everyone follows. Everyone is afraid not to take commitments because the good players will be gone.

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@Ohiodad I don’t think any classes are completed until they have the data they need. That said, these coaches seem really good at predicting which kids are going to come thru with the academic credentials required to get thru pre-reads and the official ad com. But they aren’t perfect and sometimes they’re reaching out to kids late in their junior year or early in their senior year. Absolutely everything is contingent on these kids delivering the academic goods. If academics and testing aren’t a kid’s strong suit, I’m with you in advising that kid not to commit early. But if your kid has scored in the 99th percentile on every test since they started school, you can probably trust in this process and in the coach’s word that they’ll give you full support.

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@twoinanddone, but if all the scholarships are being spoken for in 9th and 10th grade, then how does Hopkins have a slot for a kid who finds out in July/August senior year that they aren’t going to Cornell?

@doubtful, I think that is likely true, and I get how the Ivy coaches can identify kids with the requisite blend of athletic and academic ability. But the last couple pages of this thread have been about the Ivys going after the “top recruits” in these sports. Surely, all the best lacrosse players aren’t top 1% academic kids as well. I mean if you are really going after top athletes, some of them have to at least be borderline admits at Harvard, right? How does Harvard go get that borderline admit as a sophomore, when Duke can tell her she will be admitted no question assuming she meets NCAA eligibility standards?

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And for what it is worth, I still believe what I wrote earlier, that a system of soft support “would undermine the whole process” set out by the AI. Like was discussed on the first several pages of this thread, it seems likely that there are times where an applicant’s athletic endeavors are viewed as a positive on an application, but how much help that provides in the general
admissions pool is inherently unknowable, just like any other interesting EC.

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@CDK,

Does a coach occasionally write a letter to enhance the application of an already qualified applicant? Yes.
Does that letter influence admissions to admit an applicant that would otherwise be denied? Unknowable.

I’ll just reiterate what has been said many, many times here already:
In the Ivy League - there is the Likely Letter (insert qualifier to include applicants that would be issued a LL if the coach were to request it, but for some reason does not request the physical letter), and there is ‘everything else’.

The difference is a 95%+ admissions rate, vs the chances of a strong applicant with a strong EC.

Using the term “soft support” makes it too easy to blur the line between the LL and ‘everything else’ To prevent confusion, can we refer to the latter as an ‘enhanced application’ rather than ‘soft support’?

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Thank you for that.

I am back on the side of the fence where soft support would “really undermine the whole process”. (By the way, this is your statement, which I have quoted often and attributed to you and your blog. It is not someone else’s statement, as has been suggested recently.)

OK. So pending a response from @CDK , what should recruits and their families do?

  1. Confirm whether you are being offered an athletic recruitment slot.
  2. If yes, (hooray, you are a 95+% lock) ask what the policy is for the school and the team on issuing early notifications of admission (likely letter)
  3. If no, ask if the coach will do something to give you an "enhanced application"
  4. If yes, gotta do your own risk-reward analysis based on what "enhanced" means and your other available opportunities
  5. If no, gotta decide how much athletics means versus other college selection criteria and make decisions accordingly

CDK and others, any views on this for recruits and their families?

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To me, what this boils down to is - a student with multiple Ivy teams offering support should ask for a Likely Letter and if the school doesn’t want to provide one, get a very convincing explanation for why not.

IMO it would be pretty risky to turn down a LL at one Ivy (and/or an athletic scholarship offer at a high academic school like Duke, Stanford, etc.) for a vague statement that the coach will write a letter of support at another Ivy. I guess excluding the case of a student who has his/her heart set on a particular school regardless of the odds.

There are some postings on the MIT board, for example, of students turning down Ivy LLs to apply with much vaguer support at MIT. I’m not saying that’s necessarily the wrong decision, but students should understand it’s turning down a 90% plus chance of admission for a much smaller chance (~30% from what people talk about on the MIT board).

For students where all they have on the table is one or more coaches offering to write a letter but not use a slot/LL, then hopefully “soft support” will get them over the line, but realistically they should apply to a range of schools.

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@fenwaypark, #73 I think that’s a pretty good plan.

Re;

Ha, well I know I’ve said that as has @Ohiodad51, honestly I can’t tell you who said it first, and it really doesn’t matter. Looking at my last post I said the effectiveness of “enhanced aps” was ‘unknowable’, which I see that I lifted from the post right above it. Really, I don’t claim to be the last word on Ivy recruiting, I learn more every day, it seems. With 30-40 sports at 8 different schools, nobody can know it all. It’s great when people with direct, firsthand knowledge in a particular sport can relate their experience - it just adds to the collective knowledge.

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@varska, you wrote the book dude. You should take primacy of attribution! I just assumed, perhaps wrongly, that the post was another assertion that I was being inconsistent.

And I agree with you about the collective knowledge base. Outside of stupid cat videos and allowing my wife to look actors up on imdb when watching Netflix, I think that is the great everyday benefit of the Internet.

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@fenwaypark @varska @Ohiodad51

This really is a great topic, and one that I wish was around 5 years ago!

@fenwaypark I think your algorithm is exactly correct. If you are a solid D1 athlete, and want to go to a particular Ivy or couple of Ivies, try to pin down the coach’s interest at the appropriate time and sort out the ‘slot’ / LL situation. If you can determine that you are a ‘top’ recruit for the coach and they will support you with a LL, then you should be fine. I wouldn’t necessarily stop conversations with other opportunities, but I would probably be honest. If you love a particular school but are not offered a slot/LL, then you have some more decisions to make. I would definitely ask that coach if they ever support an application outside of a LL with a letter to admissions, i.e. an ‘enhanced application’. If not, you can also ask about walk on possibilities, but I would consider moving on to school/athletic choices 2, 3, and 4, and see what your chances might be at other places. Make an honest assessment of your ability to compete at the Ivy level in your sport as well. If you still want to apply, even with athletics out of the picture, go ahead, but realize the odds. If an ‘enhanced application’ is a possibility, I would ask that coach what their experience is with that. I have heard that most coaches do this infrequently, so I am not sure it ‘undermines’ the AI/LL process at all. One school/team I am aware of, the team gets 9-10 ‘slots’ per year (with all of the AI requirements etc.), and the coach had written 4 ‘letters of support’ outside of a slot in 6 years, and 2 out of the 4 were offered admission, and these 2 were still very likely very competitive candidates for admission anyway. Not a huge difference in the overall applicant/decision pool, but a very high bump for those who the coach wrote a letter for.

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@CDK, why do you call it a “very high” bump? What makes you believe that one of these letters of support is categorically different than a really good recommendation letter from a teacher, or a kid who has shown significant commitment to another extra curricular? Admissions offices at these schools are making hundreds of decisions every year among equally qualified applicants, and there is a whole industry devoted to trying to figure out what makes one applicant stand out from another. Maybe the way to think about this is that your application will either be reviewed in a special process set up to handle athletic recruits, in which case your chances of admission are very, very, high, or your application is going to be reviewed in the ED or RD pool, and your admissions chances are much, much, lower.

As I have said before, my son was told that the admissions rep appended a note to his academic packet after the pre read saying he would be a good candidate for admission absent a likely letter. Given his talent level and the fact that he is not a “skill” player, I would think he would have been the kind of kid to use one of these recommendation letters on, The fact that the coach did not is to me pretty strong evidence that there is not much of a system outside of the likely letter process.

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@Ohiodad51 I was just looking at the coach’s rate of 50% for those that he wrote a letter of support for. You are right though that we may never know how each school, and each coach, looks at this. I would think a letter like I describe is better than a really good recommendation letter (for which each Ivy applicant likely has one or two), but obviously not a likely letter. In the end, each applicant should always evaluate all of their options, both with and without athletics in the picture.