Hello, I’m a recruit to a divison 1 college for track & field. I have 2 questions.
Any response is appreciated! Thanks!
It is up to the college. If you receive an NLI, you should have filed with the NCAA clearing house, and it should have tentatively approved your qualifications, your scores and transcript, that you have the minimum qualifications to be a student athlete. Some coaches will run this through the admissions office before making you an offer, but that isn’t a requirement. My daughter’s coach did clear it with admissions before making the NLI offers.
You can ask the coach to do this for you if you are concerned about admissions. If you sign the NLI and do not get into the school, the NLI is void and you can go to another school.
Getting an NLI means your chances of acceptance are very high. Coach should know what the minimum GPA and test scores that he can get through admissions and really shouldn’t offer an NLI without feeling very good about admission. If something comes up that the coach didn’t know about, that could change the game.
When D was being recrited for T&F she had a several schools recruiting her that were academic reaches. We had frank talks and emails with those coaches and several told her they wish they could sign her but knew they couldn’t get her through admissions. So we all moved on.
School she committed to originally wait listed her, needless to say this caused some panic. We called the coach and he said he can’t control admissions but he felt good about her scores and gpa. About 3 weeks later she got an acceptance letter. Luckily this was all before signing day (February instead of new early signing day), but if she had tried to go back to those schools she didn’t commit to they probably wouldn’t have had the same money available fro her.
Trust what the coach is telling you. Since its an NLI its not D3, and most D1 and D2 schools can get athletes admitted that meet certain minimum standards.
Thanks for the replies! Both of you guys gave me some great insight on how admissions work with the NLI. The school that I’m applying to right now is academically a reach, but I’ve talked to athletes on an official visit speaking that they had to meet a minimum test score. Do schools typically use this minimum test score for only reading and math sections?
There is no one minimum SAT score that any of us can tell you.
Take a look at the “Guide for college bound student athletes “on the NCAA site if you do not know where you stand in terms of eligibility. If the school has a higher threshold for academic performance, or the coach needs you to have a specific score to get you admitted, he/she will need to tell you what that is, there is no one single number for all D1 schools.
For the NCAA clearing house, there is a sliding scale for gpa and SAT or ACT scores. For example if your gpa is 2.5 (for just the 16 required core courses), you need an SAT of 820 or an ACT of 86 (add up the individual section scores). Lower gpa, higher test scores required. Any school can require higher numbers and there is no way to know what those are without asking the coach or AD.
The coach never told me any minimums or maximums, but some athletes from last year told me what they had to do to get in. Thankfully, the coach offered me an NLI/Likely a few days ago after getting a look on my early read with admissions. Thanks for all of the extra info! It helps as I’m still trying to learn about the college process along with my family!