Source?
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No source. I did not mean to state it as fact and the number is not exact. However, looking through swimcloud commits for past years, as well as rosters, that is a reasonable ballpark IMO. Walk ons exist but the level required is very high.
Dartmouth is unusual as they are trying to rebuild a team from scratch. They have 11 freshman women on their roster, which is unusual. I have no idea if the school allowed them more slots or if they had to rely on walk-ons. Their published recruiting standards are as fast as everyone else’s but the reality is that it is still an uphill battle for them.
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And they will not offer support without a 1500+ SAT. Same is true of Hopkins. MIT will not guarantee admissions with full support, Hopkins will. Source: coach
They announced 7 new swimmers. So I assume the other 4 are walk-ons. And even with the 7, you can’t tell which were hard recruits. And of those 7, 2 are divers, which gets back to institutional needs; those spots were going to only go to divers most likely.
I’m not sure why the number even matters. The athlete needs to be fast enough to be recruited. If not, they won’t fill a spot simply to fill a spot.
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MIT guarantees admissions for no recruited athletes, ever. There are absolutely recruited athletes at JHU with below 1500s…they also have the option to apply TO.
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That was my thought too.
I hope OP responds regarding the LL focus. What OP should be doing is looking at meet times and conference times.
As a rule of thumb if you would fall within the top 3 in 2 events and/or can score at conference championships coaches will have some level of interest. In many ways swimming is quite straight forward.
I am sure that is true, they are a top D1 lacrosse program after all, though possibly not of swimming. In fact, the number the coach threw out was 1520, but maybe there is some hyperbole, and it did not matter that admissions was TO. Our CC had also advised that 1500 would be the bar to meet.
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Agreed that different coaches can have different test requirements, even at the same school. I have also run in to coaches who require scores, even though the school is TO. Boo on them!
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I had heard that for JHU, you can apply TO as a recruit, but admissions office will not do a pre-read. I think that is fair.
I have not heard that. If true, I expect they are losing athletes to other schools where admissions will do a pre-read, and the recruit would enjoy more certainty of admission. Certainly JHU’s prerogative.
I would be surprised if they are handling the D1 lacrosse recruits this way (I guess they could admit these recruits before having them sign the NLI though).
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I would suspect D1 lacrosse will be handled differently as well. They have always treated lacrosse a bit differently.
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The focus on LL is to reflect the high likelihood/near guaranteed admission attached to LLs. Thanks to the multiple responses, the key takeaways are:
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Ivies each issue ~230, which provides an estimate of the percentage of athletes recruited with LLs at each school in a given year. the specifics for each sport/team/coach may then vary from year to year and it’s best assessed by connecting directly with that school’s/team coach
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NESCAC schools are prohibited from issuing LLs, and NESCAC schools coaches receive ~2 full support slots per team (with some variation by school/sport/year)
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MIT / Caltech don’t issue LLs, and barely weigh Coach Support
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Carnegie Mellon / Chicago / John Hopkins / Swarthmore issue LL letters
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in the case of swimming, swimcloud offers a near comprehensive mapping of the times of all the current swimmers/team/schools to assess a candidates “potential” position if they were to join
The $100 question then becomes:
if the candidate athlete scores an Academic Index (AI) within the target school average AND swims 1-3 strokes faster than the average freshmen/sophomore/junior swimmers on that college team, would that be close to a guaranteed LL?
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Nobody said that. Or if they did, they’re wrong. They can, but don’t issue that many.
One can’t boil in down into such a black/white scenario. Once again, this is a question for the coach. Different schools will have different needs. And there will be intangibles, including how the athlete interacts with the team and coaches.
Once the athlete asks the question of the coach, report back with exactly what coach said, and users will translate coach-speak to English
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I would frame it this way: if a potential recruit has the academic stats to fit at the school AND would fit within the range of recruited swimmers at the school, the coach will/might be interested.
Once the coach is interested, there will be conversations, potentially pre-reads and official visits.
Then, the coach will decide who she wants to support through admissions with her limited slots. This decision will be made in the context of the current recruits available as well as the standards needed to be competitive in the conference.
Those she supports who pass through the admissions review will be eligible to receive a likely letter from admissions.
There’s really no close to guarantee of a LL without going through those steps.
ETA: current roster will play into this also, and the coach might decide to trade away her slots for use in future years
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Its more complicated than that. The AI average for a school is just that–an average–across all sports. The AD needs some sports to be well above that average to accomodate other sports that might have a higher priority. Each team is given their own target to hit. Some sports just recruit athletes at or above their own target, others play on the average to get the best overall class they can.
Just because an athlete is a faster butterflyer than the 2 butterfliers that came in last year doesn’t mean they are a sure thing. The coach already has 2 butterliers on the squad, after all. Sometimes a coach is just looking for the best 3 events a swimmer brings to the table, and sometimes they have 3 particular events in mind.
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I wouldn’t go that far. When your chance of admissions go for sub 5% to 50/50 (this is not data, but how i have seen commonly expressed here) I think admissions DOES consider it.
There will be other swimmers with those stats. The coach may like the personality of one more than the other, they may think one has more improvement potential than the other, etc… Average times are not necessarily the same as scoring times. Finally, AI is very murky in TO environment. The first bar to meet is pretty objective, after that it’s subjective. There is no such thing as a guaranteed LL.
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You have to leave the Div 1 programs like lacrosse at Hopkins at Div 3 schools out of the equation. Hopkins uses NLI (and gives scholarships) for the lacrosse players and follow the NCAA rules for timing and commits, and those lacrosse teams play in a different conference than the rest of the Hopkins teams. Same with Colorado College for men’s hockey/women’s soccer.
Such a small number of athletes at those schools that it pertains to that it isn’t going to change the overall admissions numbers.
Good input as usual. My own experience is that the Ivy Coaches for LLs, and NESCAC for support, were fairly up front on how many LLs or slots they had.
Good input/advice. I would agree, and not be concerned so much with how many LLs they may or may not have, the important question should be, is there interest?
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I also think the emphasis on likely letters is misguided. They don’t give materially more confidence of admission than other offers of strong coach support, at most schools (MIT famously excepted).
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Yes, yes, yes and yes. There certainly are threads of consistency with all athletic recruiting, but overall it is not possible to distill divergent recruiting principles into one email. For example, while there may only be 2 fully supported slots per NESCAC team (rough, as football gets many more), there also are 3 fully supported tips per team. This means that roughly (because it can vary from team to team and year to year) there are five recruits each year that can be fully supported by a NESCAC coach with admissions. The differential between tips and slots has nothing to do with the level of support (e.g., soft versus full support) or the likelihood of admission. Rather, a coach can go down lower academically with a slot to gain admission for an athlete who otherwise would have little chance of admission. Tips are given as full support for athletes that have high academic stats and might have gotten into the school without athletics, but coach support tips the application. With a greenlighted pre-read, a supported recruit (whether slot or tip) will have a fairly high level of confidence of admission at a NESCAC school.
The one consistent thread that should be in your email is “ask the coach.” First, what you read here is based on our collective experience and things can and do change. More importantly, “ask the coach” emphasizes the importance of establishing a relationship with a coach during recruiting. The kid who may have better athletic skills but strings a D3 coach along may well lose out to the kid with lesser skills but whose attitude will be an asset for the team. Some things in recruiting just can’t be reduced to numbers.
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