Swimming Recruiting for Int’l Jr. Targeting Highly Selective Colleges

[YoLo2]

Some info previously posted on CC regarding athletic recruiting at the Claremonts indicates that coach support tends to be less influential, at least once past the two full-support slots per team.

For example:

@gointhruaphase

Re the Claremonts, I know a few recruits that got in and a few recruits that were crushed when they didn’t. The coach we met with stated that he didn’t have much pull with admissions, and his solution was to encourage recruits to apply to Pitzer. That’s my problem with the Claremonts (all great schools), but coaches may not be able to give the same level of assurance of admission that other schools can. It goes without saying that you need top notch scores and grades, but you also need to ask specific questions about the likelihood of admission. Recruits should have a fairly good idea of their chances for admission by the time they apply, and the Claremonts tend to be more murky.

And:

@gointhruaphase

My post was to point out that recruiting at the consortium schools (better than Claremont colleges?) tilts more to the MIT/Chicago side of the pendulum than to the NESCAC side. The coach we spoke to said as much. This tends to result in “over recruiting,” i.e., that the coach with less admissions lee-way encourages the recruiting process with a greater number of athletes than at some of the other D3 colleges. Back in the day when you could see the names of the coach email addressees, I remember being surprised to see 50-75 on an email that expressly encouraged the recruiting process enough to prompt long distance travel to the school (not a camp invitation).

And:

@arbitrary99

Pomona was mentioned above; the coach was clear he had two slots but they went to the athletes that could score the most points. The rest were tips that didn’t provide the admissions certainly of fit example NESCAC support, at least of an Amherst, Williams, etc.

Back to the current thread: Pomona and Claremont McKenna were apparently recently moved from the “too fast” list back to the swim list. If we are laying odds and taking bets, I would say they are by far the least likely on the current list.

The potential recruit’s season-best time in her best event this year (converted to SCY) would rank #10 at P-P and #9 at CMS for best times in that event this past season on their rosters. And those programs apparently have fewer coach-supported positions and probably also have a much larger list of pre-reads than the NESCACs, so making the pre-read selection means even less than the NESCACs and others in terms of eventually receiving an offer.

ETA: does this make a walk-on position more or less likely at PP or CMS for this athlete? Hard to say from the outside. Only the coaches would know. But based on times relative to the current roster times, I would wager that it’s a lot less likely than other places still on the swim list.