While I hate everything about freshmen thinking about college, I can see how there is value in tElling an extremely promising young athlete “if you are going to play for me, you’ll have to be admitted at my school and to do that, you will need the following in terms of academics and scores.” It is almost impossible to start a fix in junior year.
Just a thought. Carry on!
A verbal commitment has little contract value. Either side can walk away.
The NCAA gives each sport a lot of say in how it handles things. It took lacrosse about 5 years to get the recruiting rules changed. Spring sports have different timelines than fall sports because really, the last look for spring sports happens in junior year. Football teams are recruiting 25 players but a tennis team may only have 3 open spots
@recruitparent hitting the minimum AI is not that difficult if you check out the calculators. They got rid of class rank for athletes at Ivies many years ago from the AI calculations. Also, each team at each school has a different AI number to hit. The AI number per school is for the entire athletic department as a whole, and as you know football has it’s own system in the Ivies (banding) to take even lower performing students. Harvard’s men’s golf team will have a much higher AI number than the men’s basketball team by design of the athletic director.
None of the information is completely hidden. Parents (not coaches) tell topdrawersoccer my daughter is committed to Princeton so the soccer community knows about it - it is published on the world wide web to protect the kid from the coach rescinding the offer. That way if a kid does hit the test score the coach’s reputation would be trashed if s/he tries to change his/her mind. 90% of the time the kids committed as freshmen and sophomore’s hit the number and they end up where “committed”. Rarely the kids don’t make it. Harvard’s kids show up much later on topdrawersoccer than princeton so I’d guess that’s either having to hit higher numbers that take longer or the coach makes personal pleas not to.
Girls soccer is mostly white kids from rich families in the US, and since standardized test scores correlate with income and race it’s not a huge leap of faith to hit a 30 on the ACT. I’m sure freshman grades are scrutinized first so that B and C students aren’t offered to commit to the “process” at that early time.
Yes, I know how the AI works, which includes the students GPA and not just hitting an ACT/SAT Score and that the AI varies by team, sport and school. So if a Fresh or Sophomore “commit” that was borderline recruit academically to a Harvard, Princeton or other Ivy, has a poor Jr. & Sr. year as far as grades/GPA, it can effect their AI and they could potentially not get one of the allocated slots/coaches support so no LL.
The early commit of sports like soccer and demographics of the players may make it a little different than other sports. Parents, players, travel team coaches, etc.may like to announce that their daughter or player is “committed” to an Ivy but in reality for an Ivy it may not mean all that much. I am not sure how announcing and posting a verbal commitment would prevent a Princeton from rescinding an offer to a Soph. when no official or real offer has been made yet. Obviously from what we see, students do not always end up where they stated they were “verbally committing” to.
Per Ivy League Athletic Policy, July 1st prior to a prospective student-athletes Sr. Yr. is the earliest that a coach can ask the Adm. Office to review the prospects academic credentials and provide a prelim assessment.
Maybe soccer is vastly different but a student athlete that is being actively recruited by a coach, may find out then that they will not be getting the coaches support or a LL and that the student-athlete would have to apply on their own as any student would to be admitted. In other sports recruits can get bumped by a combination of better player/student academics and fall short of getting a recruited spot/support & LL. I have known student-athletes that this has happened to at Ivy schools, even after an official visit. So at that point, what strength did the verbal commitment from their Fresh/Soph year have?
I am agreement with what skieurope said about Ivy offers to Fresh/Soph & Jrs.
I’ve read that certain competitive prep schools known for grade deflation are given an up to 5 point bump on AI. Can anyone confirm this from personal experience?
@recruitparent I’m posting for other female soccer parents and kids to understand the truth. The Ivy league wants top 20 D1 team athletes first. The Ivy system is ~7 slots per class for soccer hitting minimum cutoffs. The Ivy girls soccer coaches would pick 7 national team pool players ( top100) with 30ACTs over 7 players ranked 300 with 36 ACTs and they would get them in by the way. That is very important for kids and parents to understand. Soccer. talent. first.
it is not a secret
https://www.topdrawersoccer.com/college-soccer/college-conferences/conference-details/women/ivy-league/cfid-12
Brown has a freshman, Yale has 3 sophomores, Penn-Princeton-Dartmouth each 1 sophomore under “commitments” tab today. The Ivies are competing for talent with other D1s in women’s soccer and thus have similar time lines. (90% of those kids will end up at those schools, those kids are interested in the education, are rich enough not to need fractional scholarships, and the coaches aren’t going to verbal offer C students to Ivies.)
This well known girl (O.M.) in soccer circles may go pro but UNC has a 2024 committed! is that like 6th or 7th grade?
And yes the coach will look at a transcript and tell the kid what score they need to hit.First hand this happens on the phone. It’s a small world, I have not heard of a current Ivy coach retracting the offer when the scores were hit. I’m not arguing the kid can’t change their mind legally, but very few kids have the talent as seniors to get offers elsewhere when all the likely letters are given or fractional scholarships at other D1 filled. True, the coach could pull an offer legally but that coach would be drummed out of the recruiting circuit by tarnishing their credibility.
I don’t know soccer specifically but when you get to the academically and athletically elite coaches the list is ridiculously short and everyone knows everyone else. Everyone also knows which coaches can be trusted and which ones can’t. S didn’t ask for a likely letter from his coach because we had a handshake agreement and from that coach I knew we didn’t need it (he was admitted without it). I wouldn’t have let S do that with anyone else. Conversely another coach (non-ivy) we knew wasn’t really trustworthy, so everything he told us we took with a huge grain of salt. That school was a great fit for S, but a major factor why he didn’t choose it was because he didn’t trust the coach.
Point being that a coach who rescinds an offer without a very good reason will get trashed by other prospective athletes and parents, which has a major impact on future classes. Most will keep the player with an offer even if they don’t pan out, because the reputation hit to back out of the commitment is too great.
@dadof4kids all of what you said is true. Just informing parents that if your kid is a 32-36 ACT kid they will not get strong interest from an Ivy unless they are a top30 D1 soccer talent. (Princeton had 4 wins over 3 top ACC women’s teams in 2017 - that wasn’t recruiting top 1% scholars it was recruiting top1% soccer players.) The NESCAC only gets about 2 ‘athletic factor’ kids per class so they must look to those 32-36 ACT kids to fill out their class. The Ivies get likely letter slots so their entire class can be 30ACT kids. That’s an important distinction for parents to understand at the beginning of the process. The ivies nearly completely got rid of “AI boosters”, or disincentivized it so much it won’t apply to most kids.
https://paw.princeton.edu/article/womens-soccer-overtime-goal-lifts-princeton-over-no-2-unc
I find a lot of this talk to be horsepoo ( for lack of a better term). First, all the talk about early recruits. Think about this from your kids perspective. They have to get through high school first. A lot can happen. They can do exceedingly well. They can get hurt. They can get low standardized scores, etc. Why would you EVER put your kid under that pressure? Why?
Also, people often have selective hearing. This is particularly true o those who have never attended a school like Princeton or Harvard. They think their Jane/Jonny is so great in grade 9 that they will walk away with a college scholarship to some Ivy ( not even realizing there are no scholarships based on athletics). Parents I have known whose kids went thru the DI process, had a set of peaks and valleys. Things had to work themselves out. It took time.
While I do not doubt that coaches are looking, the difference between looking and “recruiting” are very different. At the state meet for a particular sport this year, there were two coaches from very highly known prep schools looking at the rosters. They seemed to be talking about the 7,8, and 9 graders in particular who were running HS level at the state championship( I was there looking at my own kids scores and heard this). Maybe they were looking for recruiting efforts maybe not. But in each sport, coaches recognize talent. They talk about times. I also saw various college coaches. Have no idea why they were there, maybe the same thing looking at the general talent. There are also recruiters in the same event for Junior Olympics. But they are not handing out tickets to college. They are watching closely.
I can tell you one thing, I would never set my kid up to be recruited in 9th grade. I want my kids to have their own experiences, live their lives and see if they even want to pursue sports in college. Pushing kids down the path of college recruitment can often lead to the place where the kid doesn’t put effort into his/her studies. I have two nephews who went all in for sports. One ended up with an injury as a Junior and that ended the journey. They other got hurt days after committing. (Don’t want to ask who paid for college).
Please parents think about reality and the normal process for college recruiting. Don’t listen to hearsay to send your kid down a path to nowhere. This could be really detrimental to your son/daughter.
it’s a horrible thing, it shouldn’t be allowed but it is the state of girls soccer. The NESCACs fill last, before that Ivies but Ivies are only slightly later than the rest of D1.
NY Times 2014 . In case you can’t read the link “Committing to play for a college then starting 9th grade”
“At universities with elite teams like North Carolina and Texas, the rosters are almost entirely filled by the time official recruiting begins.”
You are citing a 2014 article.
https://prospect.org/article/privileging-privileged-harvard’s-real-problem
I thought this was interesting and is more current. From the article:
By far the strongest preference is granted to recruited athletes, who are admitted at an astonishing rate of over 75 percent. While 70 percent of recruited athletes with a mediocre academic rating of four (on a scale of one to six, with one highest) were admitted, the admit rate for non-athletes with the same academic rating was just 0.076—less than one in a thousand. Not infrequently playing sports favored by the privileged—among them, squash, sailing, fencing, and crew—recruited athletes constitute 11 percent of admitted students.
That link doesn’t work @dogsmama1997
It’s ironic how people can view statistics so differently. Many people, including myself, were surprised that Harvard’s acceptance rate of recruited athletes (defined as those who are slotted, have had positive pre-reads, and have ‘committed to the process’) was only 86% (from legal filings in current discrimination case).
I would love to know what happened to those 14% (~30 year(?)) that thought they were in and they weren’t. Was it poor senior year grades? Disciplinary issues? Who knows (likely any number of reasons), but many expected that number to be far closer to 100% than it actually is.
I have a friend whose daughter was a top level soccer goal keeper. Through the junior high years she was invited to national team camps, was on a couple of national finalist teams, etc. In the beginning of her 10th grade year I asked the father if she had started thinking college yet and if so where was she looking? He looked at me, somewhat panicked, and said they had started reaching out to programs over the summer and they were too late, almost every division 1 program was done recruiting her class. He learned too late that girls soccer starts in 8th grade and finishes up in 9th grade for the top programs and that following summer for the bulk of division 1 programs.
She ended up fine. She backed into a spot at a Big Ten school when a spot opened up and it turned out to be the perfect school for her. This happened before Christmas in her 10th grade year and she got lucky. Had her family had someone guiding her she probably would have ended up at a bigger name program with a larger scholarship but there is no telling if the school fit would have been as good. I can say her father would have loved a discussion like this as it would have made the process much less stressful.
to @Happytimes2001 correct. you think soccer recruiting in high school has changed since then? it has not. Coaches can talk to a student on the phone at any age if the student calls the coach. That has not changed. A student can attend a coaches camp open to all at any age that has not changed. Official site visits have been moved later, but for soccer those were basically irrelevant for D1 and ivies (which is D1).
Yale has three class of 2021 kids as of 1/16/2019
https://www.topdrawersoccer.com/college-soccer/college-soccer-details/women/yale/clgid-107/tab-commitments
I don’t see your point unless you think women’s college soccer recruiting is different today than 2014 in which case you are wrong.
yes @iaparent you are absolutely correct. My biggest misconception was that Ivy league wanted great students that are good soccer players. They want the greatest soccer players who can get a 29 or 30 on the ACT.
And yes the timeline is bad for many, many reasons but unless the NCAA bans coaches from talking to students on the phone it won’t change. Soccer is a fractional scholarship sport at the big schools and because it’s a rich person’s sport, they can have rosters of 28 kids with hopes that 15 contribute to the team. (=they can recruit early and have one-third to one-half of each class be busts.) This is very different than football where the best players come from typical incomes or below middle class and can’t afford to pay a dime of tuition and must have full scholarships. The other way to slow down the recruiting timeline is to make women’s soccer a ‘head count sport’ meaning full scholarship for each kid or full walk on.
This practice hasn’t been changed because coaches and prospective recruits would just speak thru an intermediary, such as the recruit’s current coach(es) and/or recruiting consultant. Allowing recruits and college coaches to speak reduces participants, and likely results in more efficient and accurate communication.
Softball has had significant impact on reducing early commits (many girls were committing in junior high), by banning early commits (prior to junior year). It seems so simple, but other sports aren’t there yet.
I understand some sports have banned early commitments but I guess I don’t understand how that is enforced since until the NLI is signed there is no binding commitment. I would imagine in those sports coaches are still making the offer in say 9th grade and the kid has made up their mind and probably told the coach. Coaches have never been able to talk publicly about a recruit until the NLI is signed so I am not sure what has changed. I would imagine the kids are still all over social media saying where they have committed to, how can that be stopped?
@anon145 It is forbidden on CC to dispute. So I am not going to respond. OP was originally talking about another sport, I believe basketball.
My comments were more general in nature as to the detrimental effects of kids who are recruited too young and parents who put all their eggs in the sports basket when a kid is in middle school or 9th grade. Stresses the kid out and the parents too. What parents are told by coaches is not a signed contract or commitment. It’s talk and talk is cheap. And while some may know about their kids specific sports, I rarely find that this people who “know the system” so well end up with their kids Harvard/Princeton. As with most things, time will tell.
Coaches can certainly help move the pendulum in one direction. But they cannot replace poor GPAs, Test scores and all the rest. There are LOTs of great sports kids out there these days. And with VERY rare exceptions one kid can be passed over for another if the criteria isn’t met or the kid doesn’t have a work ethic.
Yes, parents, coaches and club teams need to bring kids to the attention of the right programs.
BTW, UNC is not Princeton. That basically is the bottom line. If you say you have been recruited to Princeton and end up at UNC, that is very different.
Not necessarily. My daughter started looking for a spot AFTER junior year. She said she didn’t want to play in college so we never looked. Yes, a lot of the D1 schools had finished recruiting for her year, but there were still D1 schools interested in her. Many of the big name schools have LESS money for early recruits. The coaches have 12 scholarships to divide among the team, and many have a specific policy of how to divide, like each recruiting class has 3 of those scholarships to share, and so a high school freshman may only be offered 1/8 of a scholarship because the coach can’t give out all the money that early.
Also, my daughter was tiny as a 13 year old high school freshman. She was still pretty small as a hs senior but had 3 years of playing with bigger kids under her belt, had several academic and sports scholarships so the college coaches could judge better how she’d fit in with college athletes. I don’t think she would have received great offers if she’d acted earlier.
Lacrosse no longer allows recruiting of freshmen and sophomores (and no, the coaches DO NOT just make the offers anyway, which is against the rules). A girl my daughter had played with since 6th grade received one of the early offers from BC (a top ranking team every year). This girl was 5’6" in 6th grade and really, about double my daughter’s weight. She got her 1/10th or 1/8th scholarship. Others from their club team waited and many got bigger scholarships or offers from Ivies or from schools they preferred. Those who waited weren’t taking the scraps. Plenty of good offers, plenty of money left for hs juniors and seniors.