<p>We are starting the college search again for child #2. I can't seem to find any information about HS athletes on CC although I'm sure there are threads somewhere.</p>
<p>Is it appropriate to contact coaches at schools that we are interested in? If so, how soon would we do this (my S is class of 2012). ANY information that people can offer about college athletics and recruitment would be helpful. BTW, my S's sports are tennis and cross country if that makes any difference.</p>
<p>There is a forum for “specialty admissions” that is all about athletic recruiting. Lots of info about D3 recruiting.</p>
<p>Go back to the main page, scroll down a little and click on it and start reading the old threads to see if there is already info that would be useful and then ask away.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>Dear NJ Mom:</p>
<p>Check out the athletic recruiting forum, but the answer to “when” is NOW!</p>
<p>Thanks for the info!! CC is the BEST!!</p>
<p>It is also important to register with the NCAA</p>
<p>xcountry is a timed sport so you can compare your son’s times against the schools that he is interested in. If he is competitive for one school that he is interested in, you can check how that school places in its conference, so you will know about other schools.
I don’t know about tennis recruiting. Soccer and lacrosse have college showcases.
NCAA registration is necessary for DI and DII but not for DIII.</p>
<p>It is absolutely appropriate to contact the coaches at schools that your S is interested in attending, especially for DIII schools. These coaches do not have the time or budget to do a lot of “cold call” recruiting, so they many times rely on an athlete making the first contact.</p>
<p>My S plays D3 tennis. He also played soccer in HS. He applied to a few different D3 schools and most of them had a online form you can fill out through the athletics part of the schools website to indicate an initial interest. </p>
<p>But if you are doing school visits, definitely work in a visit with a coach when you go. Coaches also often use current students in the sport to serve as the “tour guide” when you go. That helps give your S a feel for the school and type of athlete on the team.</p>
<p>I know you will find a lot of info on the athletic forum. We went down this D3 sports path (although D did not end up playing her sport in college in the end). We did the following:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Made a video of her playing her sport. Included some drills and match footage. Her coach helped us do this. Burned it onto DVDs. You can get them professionally done, we did not.</p></li>
<li><p>At each campus we visited, part of arranging our visit was contacting the coach and arranging an interview. We sent the DVD ahead of time, too. And took some extra copies in case it got lost…</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Two years is a long time, though. Injury issues her senior year helped my D decide not to continue with her sport, AND she fell in love with a D3 school that had a VERY good team in her sport and she wasn’t good enough to play there. Other schools were interested. But it wasn’t important enough to her to pick a college based on that. She is a junior now, and does not regret that decision.</p>
<p>NJ Mom- Feel free to send me a PM. My son was a recruited (D3 and D1) runner and I would be glad to help. It is not entirely true that since cross country is a “timed” sport that you can compare times. The times you want to compare are TRACK times. Cross country (I want to say CC, but I’ll confuse us all) courses vary greatly in difficulty and even in accuracy of distance, so the times coaches go by are track times. It is fairly unusual for a runner to be recruited JUST for cross country. Usually they are 3 (or at least 2) season athletes and run the distance track events.</p>
<p>D1, a high school track and cross country runner, made appointments with the appropriate coaches at each of the D3 schools she applied to. I was surprised by how much time those folks were willing to spend with her. In a couple of cases, the individual discussions (and personally guided tours) lasted more than five hours. At one highly-ranked engineering school, the track coach even called to let her know of her acceptance well before (two months earlier) the official acceptance posting. </p>
<p>By the way, the FIRST thing EVERY coach asked about were D1’s grades and test scores, not her times!</p>
<p>(Incidentally, my daughter chose to attend a large university with a D1 track program, and decided to focus on academics instead of sport.)</p>
<p>I would also encourage you to read the threads on the “athletic recruits” page, as described above. There is a lot of information there from past years that is still relevant today.</p>
<p>Also, please note that tennis is different from many other sports in that high school team performance is almost totally disregarded in tennis, whereas it is the only factor in some sports, such as football. In fact, some players at my kids’ school don’t join the tennis team because they are so much better than the other players that they can’t get the same level of practice that they get at their normal daily training sessions. (My son trains year-round, but just goes from team practice at school to training at the club so he can get in the last hour of training there; we’ve paid for it anyway.)</p>
<p>In tennis, the best website I’ve found for tennis recruiting information is tennisrecruiting.net. You can enter your child’s name to see where he is ranked using two different measures. The third measure of ranking is USTA rankings. All three of these are based on USTA tournament play.</p>
<p>NJMom: What sport is your child looking to play in college? My D, who is currently a senior in college, did the whole tennis D3 recruiting thing when she was a senior in high school. Her private coach had placed many kids in college teams and had it down to a science (he now coaches the #1 player in the 18s). Things to be aware of:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Start early. Get a packet ready with a sports resume (high school team wins, regional placement, national placement, sportsmanship awards etc.) and send them ahead to the coaches you want to meet. D and her Dad visited several schools in the East Coast over spring break junior year and had appointments to play with the teams at each school. She got an earful from team members about the colleges when she practiced with them.</p></li>
<li><p>Fill out the NCAA forms.</p></li>
<li><p>Create a video of your child playing with someone at his caliber of play.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>In the end, she chose not to play college tennis and is quite happy with her decision. She felt it would have been very difficult to do pre-med and play college tennis. She does play club tennis at her Div.1 university which is competitive, but not obligatory. Interestingly, she sometimes hits with several of her friends who do play Varsity at the same school and their stories confirm her decision not to play.</p>
<p>Your child should really consider the time commitment and make sure they really want to play in college. If money is an issue, sometimes you can get a better academic scholarship than what is offered for a tennis scholarship (this was the case for my daughter) especially since Div. 3 do not generally offer sports scholarships. Being recruited does help with admissions, however, because the coach can request you be given special consideration in some colleges.</p>
<p>NJMom: What sport is your child looking to play in college? My D, who is currently a senior in college, did the whole tennis D3 recruiting thing when she was a senior in high school. Her private coach had placed many kids in college teams and had it down to a science (he now coaches the #1 player in the 18s). Things to be aware of:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Start early. Get a packet ready with a sports resume (high school team wins, regional placement, national placement, sportsmanship awards etc.) and send them ahead to the coaches you want to meet. D and her Dad visited several schools in the East Coast over spring break junior year and had appointments to play with the teams at each school. She got an earful from team members about the colleges when she practiced with them.</p></li>
<li><p>Fill out the NCAA forms.</p></li>
<li><p>Create a video of your child playing with someone at his caliber of play.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>In the end, she chose not to play college tennis and is quite happy with her decision. She felt it would have been very difficult to do pre-med and play college tennis. She does play club tennis at her Div.1 university which is competitive, but not obligatory. Interestingly, she sometimes hits with several of her friends who do play Varsity at the same school and their stories confirm her decision not to play.</p>
<p>Your child should really consider the time commitment and make sure they really want to play in college. If money is an issue, sometimes you can get a better academic scholarship than what is offered for a tennis scholarship (this was the case for my daughter) especially since Div. 3 do not generally offer sports scholarships. Being recruited does help with admissions, however, because the coach can request you be given special consideration in some colleges.</p>
<p>Thanks everyone for your replies! My S has been playing USTA tennis since he was 8 years old. He discovered cross country as a freshman in HS and quickly rose from the best runner in his school to the best runner in the county this year. Problem is, from what I am reading from your posts that one needs to run more than cross country. He plays HS tennis in the spring season so he has no “track record” for track.</p>
<p>He is not sure which sport he would want to pursue in college if any. He is also ranked #1 in his rather large suburban HS and has excellent SATs, so we are wondering if going the athletic route is even worth it. I also worry about his doing pre-med and maintaining a varsity sport. Maybe the club route looks best for him.</p>
<p>NJMom–Please let us know how the process goes for you!</p>
<p>Hi NJMom,
Come visit us over on the athletic recruits forum. We’ll talk your ear off!</p>
<p>[Athletic</a> Recruits - College Confidential](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/athletic-recruits/]Athletic”>Athletic Recruits - College Confidential Forums)</p>
<p>NJ Mom, many D3 athletes participate in multiple sports. For example, Swarthmore had a Rhodes Scholar a couple of year ago who played soccer in the fall and ran track in the spring. Coaches and deans have told us that admissions committees at D3 schools love being able to fill spots on two teams with one admit. I agree with those who say to contact tennis coaches ASAP. When they find out that S is also the best in the county at XC, their eyes wil ight up.</p>
<p>I agree with Coase. A girl in my son’s high school is playing both tennis and soccer for Texas A&M. She won state in both sports because they were in different seasons.</p>