Targeting schools before you have scores

Athletic Recruits
1

This seems like an impossibility to me and yet we are already going to showcases where we are being asked to target schools. Last year I just left it blank because it was frankly absurd. This year, not so much. Also, already participating in open gyms and have had two D1 coaches in and several others. How on earth would that even be a conversation if you don’t have any idea how you will score?

I want to get a jump on this process because there will absolutely not be time to visit schools the way most juniors and seniors do. We will be busy with tournaments during normal visit times and we need to have a list of schools we want to look at before junior year anyway to give to coaches.

2

Do you mean SAT scores? If you school offers “unofficial” practice exams take one. It’s good practice and you will get a ballpark idea of where you wills core. It should go up some as you get into your junior/senior year but if you are staring at a 1000 that’s different from starting at a 1300. If your school doesn’t have these maybe you can take a practice exam online – often bundled with the purchase of study guides and such. Not sure if they all full length but still a ballpark.

3

Without knowing the athlete’s gender, or sport, it will be hard for people to give advice.

Regardless, if you’re early in the process, I’d suggest having 10-20 targets across the athletic and academic spectrumm.

4

I know boys’ soccer, so my advice is based on that. There is so much to unpack here!

There’s targeting athletically, and then after that there’s targeting academically. Kids that are high level D1 recruits stand WAY out, as early as 9th grade. In 9th grade, they are the best player on a prep school team that has very few 9th grade players. If you have a kid like that, reach out to Stanford, Notre Dame, UNC etc. (And, you don’t need my advice!) Plus – the coaches will find you.

If you don’t have a player at that level, then 9th grade is still to early to really target schools. You may as well reach out ahead of tournaments, to a range of lower D1 and higher/mid D3 schools. Your club coach can provide guidance.*

As for the academic part, the SSAT score should give you an indication of the SAT. If you are focused on high academic d3s, your kid’s grades and scores should be close to admitted students, but can be a bit lower. If you are an impact player, there’s more academic leeway.

Possibly helpful anecdotes, from the players themselves: one got into Williams with a 3.4 GPA. Stanford’s cut off for the SAT was 1250. The lowest SAT for an athletic recruit admitted to Emory was a 1230. Finally, the SAT for Michigan and some Ivies is 1100 (that’s what the recruit said, I am not 100% sure of this). If your player is likely to score a 1500 on the SAT you probably know this already. Similarly if it’s likely to be 1100. Anything in the middle, I kind of think you don’t have to worry about if you get the athletic piece right.

Bottom line: unless you have a true superstar you still don’t really have to worry about targeting/reaching out. At least with boys soccer.

*I found no coaches willing to project where a 9th grade boy would end up. While annoying at the time, now that I have an 11th grader, I see why. Kids are still developing, some improve, some stagnate and are passed by. Also a college coach told me boys make a big jump between 10th and 11th grade, some make that jump and some don’t, and you can’t tell with certainty ahead of time.

5

To help you we need to know when graduation is and what type of schools you are targeting. There’s a big difference in what you need to for MIT vs Ole Miss. :slight_smile:

I would suggest looking at the schedule and finding a good spot to take a prep class and then the tests. For my swimmer it was later summer before Junior year.

6

Some great advice so far, especially from cinnamon1212.

Having shepherded my younger kid through the recruitment process (non headcount sport), we started by asking a college coach we knew if he thought she could play at the college level. This was when she was in 8th grade and had had some good results at the national level. His reply was favorable.

After getting this confirmation that the potential was there, we then started thinking about what programs/coaches she might want to play for…then overlayed a realistic lens over that list knowing what sorts of players the programs had recruited in years’ past. We probably started doing that late freshman year.

We knew that Ivies would want to see a 1400-ish score (for my kids’ sport) based on conversations with other parents and/or college & club coaches we knew. And pretty much any schools is going to want to see as high a GPA as possible in as appropriately challenging a schedule as possible (daughter had the GPA/schedule part covered).

Knowing it would be advantageous to know if she would be able to get a 1400-ish score, we signed our daughter up for one of the diagnostic SAT tests offered by tutoring companies. in the summer of sophomore year. That, plus her PSAT, allowed us to further refine list as well as make plans for test prep. We also knew that she would be at the low end of top tier/top end of second tier of recruits from an athletic POV (sport has national results/ranking system). Which again, helped further shape list.

I think another factor in the overall calculus (which is going to be different for every family) is what sort of experience my daughter wanted out of college athletics…did she want to be a benchwarmer on a national contender or did she want to be an impact player on a top-10 team? Did she want Div1 or Div3 experience (from both athletic and academic standpoint)? Etc.

FYI, I handled communications with coaches when my daughter was a sophomore (I didn’t want her to worry about college stuff prematurely), but she took over for her junior and senior years of HS.

7

You might not know exactly, but you probably can guess at the score range. And your kid has been getting grades for a while now. Even if they aren’t all HS grades, a middle school A student is likely to stay that way, so is a B student. For 90% of kids, standardized test scores don’t deviate that much from what you would predict based on GPA and the other 500 standardized tests they give our kids in school.

And as was said above, how good you are at your sport is inversely related to what kind of scores you need. Those bottom 25% numbers on the test score ranges come from somewhere, and as the parent of an Ivy athlete I am telling you that athletes disproportionately fill those slots. Here’s how one Ivy coach explained it to me. First year starter, 26 ACT is fine. Developmental guy who may or may not ever see varsity time? You need a 34. The rest fall somewhere in-between.

Also different sports vary wildly. If you are in a sport populated mostly by kids of upper class parents (Squash, Fencing, etc.), scores need to be pretty high, especially for girls. If you are in a more blue collar sport (wrestling) or a revenue sport (football, basketball) scores can be much lower. If you give that info here you will probably get a pretty good range pretty quickly.

If you haven’t already, try to get some projections athletically where your kid should end up. I was fortunate that S had several coaches that were familiar with him and with his sport at the college level at different division levels. They told me where they thought he should go, and I thought they must be smoking crack to think he was that good. Because at the time his (lack of) success made their predictions sound like they were coming from an insane parent, not former college coaches. But what they saw that I didn’t were the intangibles that helped him change levels multiple times in HS. They also correctly predicted which kids that were much better than mine as freshmen had already topped out their potential and would never get better than they were at 14.

That’s part of why it is hard to make projections as a parent. First, there are too many biases, but maybe even more importantly very few of us have recent experience coaching in our kid’s sport at the college level. Those with that experience may be able to see things, both good and bad, that we do not.