<p>Coaches at schools where the sport is important tend to have the most say in the recruiting. But those same coaches are often on the line if the sport does not do well, and can be fired. You don't see that kind of neck on the block among the profs regarding who they may have advocated for the class.</p>
<p>mini,</p>
<p>Focussing on "recruiting" athletes may be splitting hairs. "Recruiting" can mean so many different things among different schools and different sports. </p>
<p>At our school, a girl got in early for waterpolo at an Ivy, but she expressed frustration that it was SHE who made all the contact with the coach, and really pressed for consideration. </p>
<p>With my d, she also made the first contact with the Coach, and THEN he became very interested in her, began calling, brought her out on a trip, etc.</p>
<p>Perhaps with sports like football, the Ivy Coaches need to make more of an effort to FIND the athletes and do so, but that has not been the case with our d or any of the other 6 Ivy athletes that got in early from our h.s.</p>
<p>Our latest was the cross-country coach at Yale who contacted a female student who had never even considered applying - she is there now. Nice "non-sports" scholarship, too. ;)</p>
<p>The thing is, they'd have no particular reason to "recruit" other than for athletes where I'd live. They can get plenty of vals and sals and violinists elsewhere, and because incomes are, generally speaking, lower here than in the northeast corridor, they can get 'em cheaper. They can keep themselves wired with much more important GCs who they depend on much more elsewhere, and they certainly aren't going to find millionaire's kids or sons and daughters of ambassadors here, and there are few desirable URMs. AND (as I indicated), yield is likely to be lower. So why should they bother?</p>
<p>(If I were them, I'd do the same thing.)</p>
<p>You are right, Bay. The young man I mentioned in an earlier post was not sought despite his clear eligibility for high level football. He and his family did the seeking, and the coaches then started the recruiting. Also his first try at the SAT netted him a 1340(M&CR only) and there was not much interest at that level. The 1450 was what perked their interest. Now, he does not play for any hotshot team, and I don't think you'll find him on any list that the national highschool football teams are. He is just one big kid who has played highschool ball and has the stats to get into top level schools too. I can see Shoshi means in her point about the sports. In the same school, there are kids who are waay up there in music ability, academic profile, nationally, and they are sitting on the waitlists while the athlete has 5 likely/early admit letters in hand. But he is clearly a rarer find than the top students/musicians. But he did have to initiate the contacts, go to certain recruiting camps that are held, etc. It's not like the Big 10 recruits who are national players and have the scouts and coaches excited.</p>
<p>Mini, just noticed your last post. Are you sure that the Yale coach contacted the athlete? Sometimes families say that when they sent the electronic interest form to the school which initiated contact. I know a number of top Ivy athletes, and not a one was contacted by the school, except a URM who would have been a prime candidate without the sports, and was known to Harvard through a summer program he took there. Every last family I know said the same thing that Bay brought up. They initiated contact either by going to a known recruiting event/camp, filling in a form, responding to a mailer that was sent out to nearly everyone that went to a certain event, etc. I could say that Yale was interested in my son based on such a mailer, but I know that everyone who went to a certain championship event got the same recruiting brochure regardless of academic stats.</p>
<p>It comes down to the rarity of the talent. Cpt's friend, a h.s. kid who is 6'4 & 250 lbs can EASILY bulk up with a weight training program. That's not a huge size for a starting lineman, but it's plenty big to get the coach's attention. How many athletic 250 pounders do you know? It's rare. Even rarer is a big athletic kid who also brings stats high enough to show he can handle elite school academics. </p>
<p>The word "recruit" is incredibly abused. I happened to be sitting next to a dad from my d's h.s. at her training-league lacrosse game this weekend. This league is informal, no tryouts, just conditioning to keep girls sharp for the upcomming spring season. D's h.s. team is a very new program & I can almost guarantee that nobody is being recruited anywhere for lacrosse from her team. But this blow-hard dad was filming his d's play, bragging that he needs to put together film because college coaches are asking d for it. In reality, the no-name lacrosse team the girls play on is not on any coach's radar, so if contact is made by a player, the pat answer is "send me some film." Only a dillusional parent would interpret that as being recruited. But many do.</p>
<p>mini may be right about the Yale coach contact in that case. At this point in the season, Coaches are hearing and sorting out who among their prospects is commiting to their school and elsewhere, so they need to reassess and make a second-round effort if they did not get what they needed.</p>
<p>Last year we did have a boy recruited for baseball to an Ivy at the end of his senior year, after he had already committed to Cal. </p>
<p>I think the "initial" contacting by the coaches does occur, but it is much less frequent than the other way around, and probably only when there is a dire need.</p>
<p>Cross-country is not really a team sport. Individual times are widely circulated, & a coach doesn't need to be familiar with a program or competition to evaluate a runner. A runner from a no-name school has a better chance of catching a coach's eye than a football or soccer player from a no-name school. Did that runner do club or summer camps that caught the coach's eye?</p>
<p>
[quote]
In reality, the no-name lacrosse team the girls play on is not on any coach's radar, so if contact is made by a player, the pat answer is "send me some film." Only a dillusional parent would interpret that as being recruited. But many do.
[/quote]
LOL. Very true. I'm chuckling at how many times I've heard this crap from parents.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>How would that have worked? ????? At the end of the school year? Of a senior? The mind boggles.</p>
<p>Stickershock,</p>
<p>You are right about running and that brings up another fine distinction in the "recruiting" processes among different sports.</p>
<p>Talent in sports like running, field events, and swimming are very easy for a coach to evaluate since the results are just statistics and fairly easily obtainable from certain websites. So a track coach can find a runner with the stats he/she needs and contact them from info found on a website.</p>
<p>cur,</p>
<p>Sorry for the anecdote. Of course its all what the kid's mom told me, so who knows. But she did say that he had already found and put a deposit on his living quarters near Cal for the Fall, then ended up going with the Ivy after being contacted late in his Senior year.</p>
<p>StickerShock- that is not quite correct. Cross country times vary widely. Courses are often mis-measured and vary in difficulty. A kid has to have run at a national meet or a meet on a well-known course (like Van Cortland Park in NYC) for the time to carry much weight. Track times are much more important. Hardly any kid is recruited just for cross country. They are recruited for track, and the distance and middle distance kids will run cross country, too. Running is a three season sport at most colleges (cross, winter track and spring track). Also, even with track times, which are much more comparable since tracks are much more uniform than cross counry courses, the coach needs other info about the runner. The coach wants to know what kind of mileage the runner was doing. Was he/she making those times on low mileage? Or-was the kid running 80-100 miles a week and already peaked? Did the kid have any competition in his/her league or was he winning every race with slower times because there was no competition?</p>
<p>Bay, I wasn't baiting you. Promise. I was just wondering if out of the blue some Ivy school knocked on his door and said "Hey, will you play for Elihu?" Did he have an app in and was on the waitlist? How else would that work? Does anybody know? Did he already have his FA in place? I really would like to know, if you have any further info.</p>
<p>No ulterior motives, just curious.</p>
<p>MOWC: But don't most kids with recuitable speed go to meets at VanCortlandt? Or the equivalent meet in their region? We had kids from all over the country there. Our team traveled to Nationals, too. If a kid isn't part of a successful team, and hasn't had the opportunity to travel, isn't that just the kind of kid who may appeal to coaches? A diamond in the rough who is not being courted by everyone else. </p>
<p>I don't think a kid will be offered a scholarship exclusively based on numbers, but it should be enough to start the recruiting process. A quick call to the kid's coach should clear up anything that numbers on unfamiliar courses won't reveal.</p>
<p>Yeah, that Bay story doesn't ring right to me, either. Especially since I don't think any Ivy baseball coach has the schwing to get a student admitted out of nowhere. Football, maybe, but the story still sounds off.</p>
<p>None of the Ivy coaches has a huge staff of scouts, etc., and it would be ridiculous for them to waste time on kids who have no interest in the kind of tradeoffs the Ivies offer. I suspect they are perfectly willing to reach out to kids if someone in the network -- a trusted alum, a current player -- says "I know this all-state kid with 1500 SATs and a 3.8 GPA who doesn't dream he could get into Harvard . . . " But most often, the alum or current player will say to the kid "Dude, totally call the Harvard coach!"</p>
<p>Also, I know this from the experience of a friend's kid, who is a very Ivy-attractive baseball player (draftable, clearly DI caliber, high test scores and decent GPA at a prestigious private school), but a junior: He went to a couple of the right camps/showcases, and the Ivy coaches have done everything they can within NCAA rules to signal that yes, of course, we're interested if you're interested, please stay in touch. It's not "recruiting" exactly, or at least not yet, but it's a long way from the experience of non-top-althletes.</p>
<p>Yeah, that Bay story doesn't ring right to me, either. Especially since I don't think any Ivy baseball coach has the schwing to get a student admitted out of nowhere. Football, maybe, but the story still sounds off.</p>
<p>I'm not challenging whether it happened or not. Whether Bay was told a fib hasn't entered into my equation. I'm still trying to figure out WHAT happened in the story. LOL. It just can't be out of the blue, can it?</p>
<p>StickerShock- Many kids from smaller programs or middle-of-the-country states haven't run on the "known" courses. This is why track times are more important. The Footlocker finalists are the top recruits, but they don't tend to go to Ivys- ever. They go to Arkansas, Texas, Oregon, Syracuse, Wisconsin, Michigan etc. The LACs and Ivys are looking at kids in the 2nd tier- the top 60 Footlocker regional kids with sub 4:30 junior year mile times (male). It all depends on the program, of course. One Ivy dropped my son and an even faster kid after summer running camp, and both boys would have been top recruits at Patriot League schools or the top DIIIs. (my son is at Penn and the other kid is at Yale)</p>
<p>cpt, we know two Princeton athletes, one who has since graduated, and both were actively recruited. One was for tennis and the other soccer. Both are very good students but probably would not have been admitted to Princeton without their athletic abilities taken into account. This doesn't mean that they weren't deserving. The one who has graduated did so with honors and is now at Oxford, and the one who is still there, is doing very well academically as well as being an athletic star. What is admirable, in my opinion, is how great their academic 'performance' was (and is) despite unbelievable demands in their respective sports.</p>
<p>MOWC: Enjoyed your slight understatement. However, a musician at Shepherd = a McDonald's AA at Duke.</p>