Hi Trudy2018,
Thanks for your reply~ I will look carefully NCAA list and requirements. The most concern is that if my daughter stay at junior(Grade 11) for one more year and then apply for USA university. Will the coach/university stilll consider her or they just want to recruit student without delay in Junior.
Thanks:)
Unfortunately, as an international student seeking matriculation at a university or college in the United States, your daughter will encounter a lot of hurdles. Since you are targeting schools with NCAA fencing programs, the first obstacle to recruitment is your daughter’s ranking. Top 16 at the junior level in an “East Asian” country is not particularly significant in pursuit of an NCAA recruiting slot. If the country is Japan, South Korea, or China, that’s better (also depending on the weapon), but it is still a very minimal level of competitive ranking. This is compounded by your daughter’s total lack of competition and results in the United States. When you add to this that her academics are below average, and that she does not have the basic test scores required for admission, I think her chances of recruitment are very low. Certainly, standardized demonstration of fluency in English is a major criterion for recruitment.
The list provided by Trudy is a useful reference, but I doubt that most of these schools will recruit your daughter. This does not stop her from gaining admission based on other factors and walking-on to the team, but I doubt admission will be offered based on her fencing or, quite frankly, based on her academics. My personal recommendation would be a school such as Incarnate Word which is a much less competitive fencing program, lower academic standards, and has recruited international fencers previously. While programs at Penn State, Ohio State, and at St. John’s regularly recruit international fencers, I think that only St. John’s provides any shot at admissions. The program often struggles to fill its rosters and regularly recruits international fencers. I think the standards at all of the other schools are too high, although I might take a run at Sacred Heart in Connecticut. I don’t think there is any headway to be made below DV1.
As for timing, schools do not track the fencer’s age, but rather their graduation year from high school. Considering the holes in your daughter’s potential recruitment CV, an additional year for her to improve academics, her fencing (including competition in the United States!), and to gain appropriate standardized test scores may be helpful to achieving her goals.
Best of luck and please keep us all informed of your daughter’s progress.
1 Like
Follow up question- how is the scholarship amount determined for a d1 non Ivy? Is it by whom? By financial need? By the strength of the recruited fencer? Do all colleges do it the same way? Do they ever just offer a token amount or is it always a minimum percentage rate? Thanks!
My understanding of DV1 athletic scholarships is that they are based on the anticipated value of the athlete and that the allocation of scholarships falls mainly to the applicable coach. The concept of a “full ride” is actually pretty rare. Most of the time when you hear about someone receiving an athletic scholarship it is a partial scholarship. The more elite athletes a team recruits, the more there is a need to subdivide scholarships to provide incentives. Scholarships can change from year to year with some athletes seeing increases and others decreases. Sometimes the graduation of an athlete with a large portion can result in increases for those coming up the ranks. Need-based aid is entirely separate (unless, I guess, somewhere in the coach’s criteria).
2 Likes
Just for context, Womens teams can allocate no more than 5 and mens teams 4.5 per NCAA rules. Considering neither IVY league schools or Div3 schools actually offer any the total amount available is very little. I would venture to guess that most are split up into partials
4 Likes
Latest stats are out. Password is fencerstats2023
https://www.fencingparents.org/fencer-vital-statistics-at-colleges-with-ncaa-fencing-teams-2022-2023
Such a great resource- it is really interesting to see this level of recruitment data.
2 Likes
Fencing is a non-head count sport, so the coaches can split up the scholarships however they want (some sports have minimums, but I don’t think fencing is one of them; see baseball).
So the coach can split them up however he/she wants to (after consultation with AD and school). They can also make promises for future years. A friend got a 50% scholarship for freshman and sophomore years, but a 100% for junior and senior, and then also got 100% for that 5th, covid year. He was a really top athlete, even coming out of hs so the coach really wanted him.
There was a time in the not-so-distant past that any amount the school awarded as need based aid was counted against the coach’s max if the student also received any athletic merit aid. So if a student got $20k as an athletic scholarship and $20k as need based aid, then the coach was ‘charged’ with all $40k (as far as the ncaa was concerned). If the coach had $200k total to award for the 5 scholarships, this student has just used $40k of it. I think this rule changed around 2016, and then there were more and more changes and exceptions with covid and students got a 5th year on their scholarships, NOT counted against the coach, and outside boosters could cover the costs, and more and more changes. You’d have to check with the coach to see what the current rule is. I found a knowledgeable person in the FA office who help my daughter and even applied her aid in the right order to get her the most benefit and pay the least in taxes (yes, even athletic scholarships are taxed if used for room and board).
There are a lot of rules about decreasing or eliminating a scholarship and the athletes have the right to appeal. There is a whole NCAA procedure for it. Of course some coaches ‘force’ athletes to leave the team, but if the athlete digs in and stays on the team, it is hard to decrease a scholarship.
What does this even mean? A carte blanche to any fencing parents who can pay twice the price of a college coach’s house can get their kids recruited?
@theodore.gannon If you are unsure about what this means, you might want to look up the meaning of the word “Acquitted.”
@SpaceVoyager “free (someone) from a criminal charge by a verdict of not guilty.” Is there anything else I am missing in this context?
If you believe that being arrested and charged with several felonies, having your reputation dragged through the mud (regardless of the outcome), and risking your actual physical freedom at a jury trial, amounts to “carte blanche” to influence the outcome of your kid’s recruitment status, then we vastly differ on the notion of “carte blanche”. A wave of the magic wand and Peter Brand and Jack Zhao are in jail. Sometimes the legal process gets it wrong, but I personally do not believe that such mistakes should embolden prospective offenders.
Well, yes, but the prosecutors will not press charges based on the similar ‘reports’ anymore because the case precedent is already established? I actually think that it will embolden coaches more than parents. They can now legitimately set up a nonprofit and openly (this seems to be the key, ‘openly’) ask for donations, and prospective parents will line up while the coaches still have complete freedom to choose.
My understanding is that the prosecutors in this case were successful in several of the Varsity Blues prosecutions. The Brand/Zhao case seems to be a bit of an anomaly. I doubt it will dissuade prosecutions in this vein in the future. There were also multiple circumstances, in addition to the alleged money laundering through charitable non-profits, including overpaying for real property and various expense offsets. I was very surprised by the verdict. It sounds as if the jury did not find the alleged intermediary creditable. I actually thought the gross purchase price for Brand’s home alone was a smoking gun, let alone paying off college loans, making car payments, as well as the funneling through the charitable organizations. What do I know…lol?
As far as I can tell, every coach who was involved in these scandals lost their job and are out of coaching. Most people would consider ruining their career to be a severe consequence–even if jail is avoided.
Yes, I am guessing the firing was based on a presumed guilty verdict to some degree, but now this. I think Brand might sue Harvard and colleges cannot really fire any coaches on similar accounts. I am just appalled at the fact that the prosecutors couldn’t pull this through and let this industry run wild.
1 Like
It’s really on the colleges to police this, and they have every incentive to do so. Successful or unsuccessful prosecutions really won’t have much effect on that. I don’t foresee any of these practices “running wild”. The schools have better guard rails in place now for the most part.
3 Likes
Although I’m sure the charges and press had something to do with Brand’s firing, he was fired according to the university for conflict of interest because he sold his home to Zhao (at an arguably inflated price) whose sons he had recruited. I doubt Brand has a viable law suit. For many coaches, even the appearance of impropriety, including conflict of insurance, is a terminable offense. This isn’t Harvard’s first rodeo.
3 Likes
In this case, Peter Brand was fired because of conflict of interest – a violation of university policy — not because of a claim of criminal actions. The acquittal by the jury (and you can read more details about the trial in the local papers (Boston Globe, Harvard Crimson) was a conclusion that their actions were not criminal; that is different from conflict of interest. Note that this was not a “Varsity Blues” case, and so not the same.
1 Like