<p>Check out your academic match and reach DIII's basketball programs. Look at the rosters, look at the heights of the players, read their bios, see what awards they got as prep athletes, look to see which year the players who play your position are going into, look at the team stats. To get recruited, you have to fill a need. Try to zero in on the programs where you think you can actually help the team, not just be another body clamboring for court time. If it's one of the DIII schools that "tag" recruited athletes, that's your goal. Some coaches have no pull at all with admissions but many do and some have quite a bit. I'm going to take a wild guess (and it <em>is</em> a guess) and say that MIT coaches probably don't have a great deal of pull with admissions, but even where the coaches don't have a lot of pull, if you are squarely in the ballpark with admissions, adding to their sports program could tip the adcom your way. Be sure to thoroughly check out the NESCAC schools <a href="http://www.nescac.com/%5B/url%5D">http://www.nescac.com/</a> and the UAA schools <a href="http://www.uaa.rochester.edu/%5B/url%5D">http://www.uaa.rochester.edu/</a></p>
<p>Since academics come first, you can wait to contact safeties until after you've exhausted contacting your reach/match schools' coaches, on the theory that getting recruited to your dream school is a higher priority than getting recruited to your safety school.</p>