<p>I've been playing basketball for 5 years now. I'm pretty good, my school team just won our championship and I've won MVP a couple of times and I was hoping if I could get recruited.. However, the basketball season is way over in Australia and I don't have any footage to show the coaches. What would you reccomend I do?</p>
<p>What grade are you applying for? You should probably have coach write a letter of recommendation.</p>
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<p>Boarding schools don’t offially recruit athletes. Athletic proficiency does, however, give you an edge when it comes to admissions and can make FA magically appear!</p>
<p>Serious recommendations from your coaches would be a big plus.</p>
<p>Well…they don’t recruit in the way DI and DII universities do, but winning games is important to them and they definitely expend great effort in luring the best possible varsity (able to play varsity at the prep school in question) level athletes. Your job is to contact the school and let them know you are interested in attending as a student. Ask for a viewbook and application. Find out who the admissions representative is for your area…even if you are an international, they will have someone for your area. Next look up the name of the coach for your sport and drop him an email introducing yourself, your statistics, abilities, etc. Fill out the prospective athlete questionairre on the school’s website (most schools have one; it might be part of the application for admission). Most prep schools do not move kids up from JV to V (maybe a few, but the majority of V athletes in the mainstream sports are brought in to the program specifically to be a V athlete in a particular sport or sports). It does give you an edge on admission and fa. Don’t get me wrong…all fa is need-based, but if you need a large amount you might get it over someone who also needs it and is not needed for an athletic team.</p>
<p>bbmom – seriously? I know you used the word “offiicially” but you know as well as fif that that many (not all of course) actively recruit for hockey ( boy’s and girls’s), football, baseball, soccer, basketball and lacrosse. Heck, fif knows of a couple of schools that recruit rowers.</p>
<p>I concur with FiF.</p>
<p>Likewise with Keylyme, FIF and sarum…all correct…</p>
<p>I agree about the recruiting. I actually got my start in school consulting by working with a top basketball prospect who was recruited by and attended Blair. In basketball, they can get an idea at a young age about whether a kid is an NBA or Div I type of prospect. Blair, Lawrenceville, NMH, New Hampton, etc—really love to take a chance on a kid like that. My Blair recruit was nationally ranked from age 9, traveled with a Nike team about 6 weeks of the year even in 5th-6th grade, and regularly played in showcase tournaments where he met prep school coaches who recruited him.</p>
<p>So I think that if you want to be actively “recruited” by prep school, you should be able to google your own name and see at least 2-3 pages of articles about yourself, even if you are only 13 or 14. If not, and you are just locally a good player, you probably won’t get recruited. But your talent and accomplishment in your sport will be noted and will help in admissions.</p>
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<p>Newyorker22- I know that you are a professional consultant, but a student on another thread actually was correct when he said that you have a better chance if you live in a boarding school rich area of New England. Someone like Keylime can probably speak more to this, but there is a crossover between professional coaches (of local “premier” teams for example) and prep school coaches. Not all prep school coaches are traditional “triple threat teachers”- some of them are just soccer professionals to use one sport. And they do go scout for local talent at tournaments. I have several friends whose children would never have considered prep school who were actively wooed. And you would not find much if you did a Google search on their names. I’m not sure how I feel about it. It shows that the professionalism of sports ids being taken to younger and younger levels. On the other hand, it has given my (non recruited) children talented teamates, and who doesn’t like to win? ;-)</p>
<p>None of my son’s club coaches are affiliated with any of the prep schools, however you are right in that some of the schools have coaches who are affiliated with top premier and academy teams. Some of the bs are loaded with kids from the same club team who are able to maintain their club affiliation as their school has close proximity to the club.</p>
<p>However…my son’s bs soccer team this year has several local (new england players), but most of the “players you could google” are from out of state (west coast) and out of country (brazil, senegal, etc.). The school we are playing next week has 10 players from Bermuda and Brazil. So, yes, they definitely look for talent…far and wide. Most of the local kids aren’t really the “big” talent; they are pretty much just high school players as it is very difficult to maintain your affiliation with a premier club or now, the new US Soccer Development Academy, if you are living at bs. I drive my son back and forth for many miles and hours throughout the year so he can maintain that club affiliation.</p>
<p>The basketball team has almost no New Englanders and is mostly PG’s. All recruits.</p>
<p>Exactly. Soccer and ice hockey come to mind, but others can chime in with their experiences in other sports.</p>
<p>OK, I am going to piece together what I’ve read from the OP’s various posts on CC and give an opinion.</p>
<p>First, your sport - Basketball. Fortunately you are a girl, because there are few (if any) boys whom at age 15 are recruitable for prep hoop. However, since girls generally stop growing by age 15, the recruitability comes down to how good you are, not how much more physical potential you have.</p>
<p>Your talent in the sport is also important here. Do you have any provincial or national credentials? Being the MPV of a local league in a place with an unknown talent base (to prep coaches) doesn’t necessarily get person on the radar screen. For example, 4 years ago, goaliegirl was considered the top goalie in boys travel ice hockey in our region of the Southeastern US. However, our region is not known for its boys hockey (I can’t think of but a handful of boys who made D1 college hockey and none who have had a shift in the NHL). So when it came to recruiting time, many coaches didn’t even return our calls/emails. And even then, some didn’t even show up to the top recruiting tournament events (fairly close for them - not us) they were invited to (and 1 who said they would be there didn’t show). The point here is that you are kind of fighting an uphill battle here when you are not from a known recruiting area. You will need to establish credentials that can be used to compare your level of talent to what the coaches are familiar with. Let’s say that you have the opportunity to come over after school is out in December and either practice with a couple of prospective school teams. That would give both you and the school an idea of what you bring.</p>
<p>Next your FA need… First, understand getting FA as an international is very difficult if not impossible at many prep schools. As much as prep schools like having internationals to make the environment more diverse for the US students, there is a limit on how many a school can take on without becoming too difficult to manage from a student body cohesion perspective. And for the most part, there are plenty of full-pay internationals to fill the slots available.</p>
<p>This being said, being a native English speaking international, some schools do not limit those by number, as the impact on the cohesiveness of the school isn’t great (too many people speaking too many languages can make it difficult to keep everyone on the same page).</p>
<p>However, being a native English speaker does not remove the FA consideration. You are still competing for a slot with lots of other applicants. The more things you bring to the table (athletic talent, academics, etc.), the better your chances of getting that elusive FA package. And when I talk about bringing things to the table, it is a relative thing. If I remember, you are an A/B student. That may be a yawner for an athlete at some of the top academic schools, but for others, you may actually be better than most of their athletic recruits. And then you might consider the strength/competitiveness of the program. If you will be an improvement to a team that is committed building its girls basketball team, you will have a better chance at FA than a recruit who is as good as others who can pay more. The point here is that you wil need to understand where you fit in to the program.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to make this more difficult that it needs to be, but I think that understanding that this is a complicated matter is very important to your chances for a successful outcome. Hopefully, I’ve helped here.</p>
<p>Keylyme - You said “Most prep schools do not move kids up from JV to V (maybe a few, but the majority of V athletes in the mainstream sports are brought in to the program specifically to be a V athlete in a particular sport or sports).”</p>
<p>I understand what you are saying here but I’ve got to tell you that this statement couldn’t be farther from the truth at many schools. This is where you need to do your homework about the school. There has been a real change in attitudes from a number of schools. Many programs are taking great pride in the players they bring into the school, develop and move up. Granted, you do need to have a candid question about where a coach sees you fit. The first thing you want to look at is rosters of teams. If you see a number of PG then that may not be the right school for you if you are younger. The other thing you want to learn about is how many students are let into the school at each grade level. I can tell you that the majority of students at Kent are Fresh or Soph. Not many Jr or Sr. It’s odd to find a PG. I have a son who went in at his Soph year, played JV Hockey, moved up to V at Jr. year. He’ll be a Sr. this coming year.</p>
<p>Again, this all comes down to doing your homework and asking the point blank question of the coach “over the past couple years, how many JV players move up”. At the same time, don’t be surprised when you see a new player/student show up the following year. It does happen.</p>
<p>^^I was speaking for my son’s school where it is not the norm for players to be moved up from jv. Kent (or is it South Kent) actively recruits from premier teams. My son has several teammates who were recruited by the coach (to go directly to Varsity). Also, we do know many, many players who are on New England premier and academy teams who, again, were recruited directly to Varsity at several other New England preps. It is difficult to really maintain a high level of soccer ability if you are not playing with your club team in the spring and summer.</p>
<p>I think on my son’s team this year, out of 22 players, 5 or 6 came up from JV (and a couple of those JV players were only there for one year as they were inititally recruited for V, but were asked to be on JV for a year because of the high numbers of older recruits to V).</p>
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I really don’t believe you have to find your name on the internet to be a recruit. A large number of 13-14 year olds who are good at a sport and play travel usually don’t have the grades or determination to get into a boarding school. They would rather stick to their travel team and not go to college and get recruited by the NBA instead. Just Sayin…</p>
<p>^^Yes and no. On my son’s soccer team, about half of the kids go to private schools. Most are excellent students and go on to play soccer at the DI and DII level. As far as bs basketball, the players at my son’s school can definitely be googled and many play at Ivies. True though that for most sports (not ice hockey or basketball), bs can actual hinder your progression in the sport.</p>
<p>Urban flop and others, I wa talking about basketball recruiting specifically. Meaning, that if you are a kid who has no idea what boarding school is or how to apply, and a coach finds you, introduces you to the idea, brings you to campus, etc—that is what what I mean by “recruited” and from what I have seen in working with prep basketball recruits (includine one who is currently in the NBA!), then I do stick to the opinion about needing to be on an AAU team with lots of google pages of articles about you.</p>
<p>But I guess there is another sense of the word “recruited”. If you mean that you contact a boarding school on your own, contact a coach, and hope that he calls you back and is interested…then of course that can and does happen with many sports including basketball. I guess that I am considering “recruited” to mean that the school finds you, plucks you from somewhere, and offers you a great opportunity that you never even knew existed!</p>
<p>But for everyone else, sports can play a big role in admissiosn and its great to contact coaches!</p>
<p>I know that some schools almost straight up recruit… We have several foreign football players and they all made reels and sent them to the coach. They also applied to schools through an international football expansion organization.</p>
<p>We had the mvp of the swedish under 19 football team… he was 16 when he won that honor. He played for Highland park for two years in the states. We have PGs that got offers from U of Denver and Baylor… </p>
<p>Unless you are a college recruit… Your chances aren’t great to get recruited. I was recruited for Lacrosse because I went to college recruitment events that were run by boarding school coaches. That is partially why I picked boarding school.</p>
<p>I heard from my friend that his Son was offered by Milton as a soccer player. I also heard from another person that Saint Mark’s School recuites outstanding basketball player.</p>