Athlete is dedicated, a strong team leader and very good but not exceptional in their sport. They have an outstanding work ethic, very good grades and 34 ACT. Talking with coaches at selective colleges who say I only have “x” scholarships and your athletic stats aren’t quite there but keep us posted. Is there a point when you can say, I’m not looking for a scholarship, I just need support with admissions or are the admissions tips tied to the scholarship money?
What type of selective schools are you talking about? If you are talking about D1/D2 schools, outside of the Ivies, perhaps the coach has some pull with the AO for walk-ons. You might as well be direct with them and ask them up front if they can just support the athlete’s admissions application.
If you are talking the Ivies or D3’s, there are no athletic scholarships. The pull the coaches have with the AO is only tied to admissions. In those cases, the coach was talking about recruit spots but you thought that meant scholarship spots. You can interpret “I only have “x” scholarships [recruiting spots] and your athletic stats aren’t quite there but keep us posted” to mean the athlete is not on the coach’s recruit list but that may change if his/her top athletic recruits fall out (decide to go elsewhere, get rejected by the AO because their academics are too weak).
The schools don’t give the coach endless slots, and even if they have scholarships to divide between several athletes, those athletes still cost the coach - uniforms, transportation, food, coaching and training staff time. Most teams aren’t open ended for number of athletes on a team.
If you are talking about a school that gives actual scholarships, being willing to be on team for free or a token amount may get you a spot. Probably depends on the school. I know several athletes on the local D2 team that get peanuts but since the coach gets then almost for free he is happy to have them. May differ by school.
It not being on the team for free that the OP is interested in, it’s having the coach push the application through admissions as a recruited athletes.
You can have an honest conversation with the coach at any time. What are the chances, where do I stand on the depth chart, can you offer any support with admissions? Money was important for my daughter, so that question was toward the beginning of the process. I tried to be a little more tactful and would ask “How does this work? will she be eligible for merit aid and athletic aid?” One coach told me she didn’t give aid to freshmen, so we knew that school was off the list.
It really depends on whether or not you are talking about D1 or Ivy/Nescac. Because it really doesn’t work this way for D1. D1 programs (even Stanford) dont need to support good students. All their recruits/ athletes need is the NCAA minimum.
Ivies and NESCACS do not give any scholarships, just straight up financial aid. Top recruits are offered spots at all schools, if they are admissible, in order of desirability. After the top 10, for example, are secured then the academic spots of 10 or 5 or whatever are brought in and vetted by the team and coaches --and supported spots are offered in order and as students accept or decline they move on down the list. The need for academic boosters depends on the stats of a given year’s recruits and the overall team stats and any shift in Academic Index for that year. This is really an AI situation as D1 doesnt need AI boosters.
I know that @Center knows this, but just to be clear, Ivy League colleges are D1 schools.
Yes thanks for clarifying though!. Accurate to say a subset of D1?
I suspect the OP is talking about a hard to get into D1 school like ND or Duke or Fordham.
Depending on the reference, “D1 colleges excluding Ivy League schools” will generally be OK. Those 8 have their own recruiting rules. Whether your statement earlier accurately applies to Stanford is outside of my area of expertise, so I’ll let someone else address if needed.
@twoinanddone maybe and @skieurope yes Ivies have their own rules i.e academic index and FA only. Yes Stanford operates as any D1.
@twoinanddone I understand that he is looking for admissions support. I agree my example doesn’t necessarily directly apply to a selective school. But my point was that if the coach can get the poster’s son for free, that may make him a more desirable recruit than one who needs money. If nothing else, it frees up money to use to entice a more desirable recruit. For example, if bench players normally get 20% and starters 60%, the coach can offer 80% to the potential difference maker who is on the fence instead of the 60% he has already offered. So a bench player willing to play for free is more valuable than one who requires scholarship. Once you get out of basketball and football, the men’s sports are all short on scholarships they are allowed to give.
This won’t help at all schools, but might at some.
Thanks for all the input. To clarify, first (lifelong dream) and second choices are at very selective D1 schools where acceptances run below 20% and no ED, so it’s a risk waiting to see if athlete can get in without support and walk on. Distant third choice is a private D1 where coach will likely ask athlete to go ED.
I don’t think the coaches get unlimited slots, even with limited scholarship money. For example, take Hopkins lax. The coach has 12.6 scholarship for the men’s team. So say he has 4 full scholarships to give and divide among freshmen recruits, and he wants to get 25 freshmen through admissions. I don’t think the school will let him take 25 freshmen and get them through admissions, no matter how thin he slices the $$ and even if some of those 25 are getting no scholarship money. In fact some of the 15 may be getting no money. The school may allow him to support only 15 recruits though admissions. At some point, it makes the coach an admissions officer if he’s allow unlimited recruits.
All you can do is ask.
@twoinanddone is right on point.
Are any of the first and second choices rolling admissions or EA schools? Under 20% acceptance rate are obviously tough schools to get into, but that stat is for all applicants. With a 34 ACT, presumably high GPA and at least 1 standout EC, most likely your athlete individually has got a better than 20% chance. Looking at the CDS of those schools, where does the athlete stack up? ED is just such a limiting choice, even if financial aid is not an issue, especially for a school that is a distant third.
AFAIK, what @twoinanddone says above is correct. Coaches at highly selective D1s can offer admissions support to some number of recruits who are not scholly recruits. In the world I am most familiar with, football, these are known as PWO’s, or preferred walk ons. In my experience, coaches are limited by the NCAA roster size limits in the number of PWO’s they can support. So again in football terms a D1 FBS school is limited to 85 scholarship players and 110 rostered players. Those 25 extra players are PWOs, pretty much all of whom were given admissions support by the coach as an incentive to walk on and get pounded on the practice field.
As far as the equivalency sports, my guess is that @dadof4kids is correct, and even outside the roster limit/scholarship limit band, if the recruit is worth the roster slot then the coach may be motivated to trade admissions support for the ability to use his finite scholarship dollars elsewhere. It might be enough to break a tie between two recruits, it might be worth a little more than that. Really hard to tell.
Quite honestly though I would expect that if the coaches thought the recruit was a good PWO candidate they would have brought it up when they said the recruit was not quite at scholarship level. But it certainly doesn’t hurt to ask.
Based on what we’ve seen with teammates and in our own conversations for swim, coaches do sometimes have slots for support through admissions but no money. That’s the kind of thing that the coaches communicate to you. If the coach is saying “keep us posted” I thought that was coach-speak for “You unfortunately don’t make it on the list for coach support right now but if you get admitted on your own merits let us know”.
The other thing to consider is male vs. female sports. On the male side I have started to see teams have self imposed (or AD imposed) roster limits in order to comply with title IX. Just last year I had an athlete willing to walk on, never expect money turned down at several power 5 schools where he would have been competitive with the rest of the roster (and not needing coaches support) as they didn’t have a roster spot for him. On the flip side he landed a walk on spot at a perennial top ten school in his sport because a top recruit fell through and they had a roster spot as a result. He is happy as can be but knows he is one big recruit away from being cut (unless he improves dramatically) in order to open a spot of the recruit. So far one year down and on the roster for year 2, only 2 more years to sweat.
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@iaparent illustrates several key points. Title IX makes it much harder for males in general, across the board. Lots of unsavory things reported with dozens of females on rosters who never play or practice. Also every school is different, every division is different, every sport is different, every coach is different (winning or losing, tenure can equate to power and influence). So many variables. At the end of the day a top recruit knows they are top recruit. Top students that are middle caliber athletes should focus on schools that might need their grades.
^^Title IX creates equity for women. How does it make it harder for males?