@AppleNotFar, D3 pre-read timing is usually conference specific - Centennial schools will do as soon as they have final Junior Year grades, NESCAC won’t allow until July 1st, can’t remember North Coast timing.
thanks @Chembiodad
The coach can set any timeline he wants, as long as the conference allows it and the NCAA rules committee for that sport does. If the coach said he’s planning on a June 1 date to have offers out, I’d believe him. “We have noticed more and more juniors committing…” Not your imagination!
You have to assess where the power is. Missy Franklin told college coaches not to approach her until after the Olympics. She had enough power to do that and know that she could pick whichever program she wanted. Another swimmer who wanted to go to Stanford or Cal may not have had the ability to tell the coach she’s still thinking about it. She can take more time but must accept that the options may drop to the next academic tier or the next swimming tier (or both). If schools/coaches find that the June 1 date doesn’t work for the majority of the top recruits or top students, the date will adjust. Lax kept getting earlier and earlier and now it has jumped back to junior year. Soccer is still going earlier.
Just as an aside, I have been a hs swim coach for a long time and have not seen many commits by June 1- even top commits in New England (granted, not the swimming hotbed of the US!) are just committing this fall… Very top tier D1 might be earlier, but kids I know committed to G-town, So Carolina in the last month.
@h2ojld, think all timed sports wait until they have the latest information - top XC recruits are just committing now
@MAandMEmom One school asked my son to take his SAT’s in December presumably for that reason
When did the dates change? The first phone contact initiated by coach has been July 1 after junior year.
First official visit not until school year started senior year of high school. The early commitment of students has really been more about bragging rights since it is actually only a verbal and not really worth anything. Those student athletes still could have been denied admission or Coach changes mind which we have seen over the years in football.The swimmers who are seniors this year still had to abide by the July 1 date
The official commit date in every sport is not until the NLI can be signed, mid Nov for most sports, Feb for football. However, there just may not be any spots left at that time. Most coaches honor their offers, most schools do if the coach leaves.
The coaches cannot make phone calls until July 1 but the recruits can make them and contact the coach, the college coaches in most sports can contact club and high school coaches and everyone can be connected in some way.
I think the confusion with D3 is that student-athletes in certain sports will profess Commitment starting in Junior Yea, but given its all tied to admissions acceptance it remains fuzzy through ED or RD, as applicable.
NESCACs and Ivies can’t submit your info to admissions til July 1st, so June 1st commits are illegal. Saying that, some probably will do their pre-reads then, but I would be surprised if it was the NESCACs.
Yale coach(not swimming) told us “we travel with 20, so that’s the size of our roster”-they can have more than 20 players, but not bring them everywhere-that is a number you could ask the coach because of course it varies by team, but there is a proscribed budget and number.
The only swimmer I know who committed before senior year was on the national team- so that’s just a whole other league really. Also, in California, high school swim is a spring sport, so they will not get senior year h.s. times before admissions.
@vickisocal - Almost all commitments are made in the fall of the senior year, so senior year times don’t really matter.
As an indication of the number of early commitments, swimswam identified 101 commitments made before July 1 of this year: https://swimswam.com/first-101-verbal-commitments-high-school-class-2018/
@Hastomen123 I had forgotten about that article, but remembered seeing it after you posted the link. Thanks. Only two D3 athletes that I could see (there seems to be a few errors in listing schools in their correct division/conference). I was surprised by the number of Ivy commits: I guess those schools really moved to get pre-reads done? I’m also wondering how important 10th grade short-course times were in getting these kids noticed early by these schools; or was it more likely their December times from 11th grade? It seems that end-of-season short-course times might have solidified support for these kids but they must have already been on the coaches’ radars for at least a few months before that if not longer.
@AppleNotFar, not certain if you were surprised by, but the numbers that were listed as committed at many of the schools can’t be submitted by roster sizes - makes you wonder about validity of reporting as I’ve seem the same discrepancy on lax recruiting sites.
@Chembiodad Do you mean that UCLA and VaTech won’t be adding 12 women each to their rosters next year? 
Do you think that the kids on this list and the other kids who are being recruited by these same schools were surprised by who is on there and how many there are?
Does it make a difference to coaches whether a kid publicly announces their verbal or are they satisfied with a private verbal for purposes of holding a spot for them on the roster? I’m not including the tippy-top recruits here who we assume are sure bets. But for the rest, if a public verbal is needed, then perhaps some of these kids deliberately make an early verbal even without definitive coach support or even preread results to increase (or at least not jeopardize) their chances of getting on the roster? If they’ve got a solid backup or two, who the kid may have even told in advance that they were going to make an early verbal elsewhere, then maybe those kids are actually playing it safe under the circumstances.
And does anyone have an estimate of how many surplus prereads a coach may ask for over and above the number of roster spaces they have for that year? Or do coaches submit “rolling” prereads whereby they start with the number of kids they can add to their roster and only submit additional prereads as they receive negative results, if any?
I also noticed a lot of locals to me on this list who just recently were listed as having committed on collegeswimming. I wonder now if (a) the list is unofficial until closer to October when more were reported; or (b) some of these are “expects” which never came to fruition.
I’m guessing the ED1 deadline forced a number of kids to firmly commit, which at the same time, opened some roster spots for other kids.
Another coach told us what the school typically offers out of state students in terms of scholarship in terms of percentage, not an offer, but left us wondering is the percentage of tuition only; tuition, books, and housing; or some combination there of? Would have been nice if I had these thoughts during the conversation but wondering if anyone knows how it typically works…
^^ I’d guess it is a percentage of the things the school CAN offer (tuition, fees, R&B, and maybe books). I think they sometimes offer instate tuition so that can be quite a savings too.
You should ask about the percentage. For the big 5 conferences at least, the percentage is a percent of the total “Grant in Aid”, which correlates to the total cost of attendance for the school. That cost of attendance/grant in aid number is larger than tuition, room & board, and books. It also includes fees, computer expenses, travel, and other anticipated expenses. So for students (like football players) receiving 100% of grant in aid, they receive a stipend in addition to having their school costs covered. Note also that the grant in aid will be customized per student, so it may be higher for students that have higher travel expenses.