Agreed. One student’s talents don’t dismiss another student’s contribution. And, let’s not forget, some student athletes are also musicians, thespians, and vice versa. Plenty of talented young students in the arts are/were athletes as well.
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My D was rejected. And, to second fandg96, she doesn’t need this type of “character building” lesson right now in her life.
So rough to go through the process only for it to not fall out as expected. Big hugs to your daughter.
I wonder what final numbers will look like.
WSA Senator Hannah McKiernan ’24 asked about target numbers for the incoming first-year class, given the large size of the class of 2025, and also asked how the University plans to accommodate these students if the increase will be long-term.
“The large class this year is something that the University has to, should I say, digest over the next few years,” Roth said. “Facilities and ResLife are working hard to identify those places where students can comfortably live. We will not have a large class next year. How much smaller it will be than normal is still being discussed with Admissions. We have more applicants than we’ve had in the past, and our target number will be dramatically lower than what we have this year. We don’t want to be in a situation when the big class graduates that we’re very under-enrolled. So we’re trying to balance that.”
So sorry to read this. These poor kids, as if their worlds haven’t already been turned upside down the past two years.
Recruited athletes not getting accepted after a pre-read used to happen a lot at Haverford. There are old threads on this. It happened because admissions was not using ‘pre-read approval’ in the same way the coaches were or the general athletic recruiting pool used it.
Haverford admissions would be asked to determined whether the student athlete was qualified for admissions and the admissions office would say yes, this student is qualified for admission. Coach, athlete, parents thought that meant they were in. Nope, to the admissions office that meant they were qualified to be in the applicant pool but no decision had been made yet.
Were the coaches misleading? I think so. Did the athletes hear what they wanted to hear, that they were ‘in’? I think so.
The coaches at Wes may not be as good at knowing who will be accepted since test scores are no longer required, subject tests are no longer required, some high schools gave a lot of P/NP grades during covid, etc. Plus applications are up. The admissions office may think “Why does this lax coach need 5 slots? There are dozens and dozens of apps from students who were lax team captains, played in the state championship game twice, were on the state VIP team…can’t the coach just pick one of those (with the tippy top grades)?”
In the past the coach may have gotten his ‘I want him’ with just a tip, but now the admissions office isn’t just picking between the coach’s tip who was similar to another non-athlete, but now the two aren’t tied for admission but the non-athlete is way ahead.
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From what sports were students deferred, or denied?
Prospective recruits deserve that transparency.
I think people are trying to understand whether this happened to the ~2 slots per team or the larger pool of 4+ tips per team.
Some of the past posts seem to imply that those deferred or rejected were slots with full coach support.
How do coaches manage their recruiting class size if their expected recruits aren’t getting in?
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My understanding - and the only scenario that makes any sense - is that these deferrals occurred in the murky depths of recruited athletes, sometimes referred to as “supported” athletes, who were deemed to have enough academic clout that they didn’t need an actual slot. Slots are reserved for recruits about whom the coaches have doubts as to whether they would otherwise get into Wesleyan under the admissions standards that exist at the time.
Supported athletes are given what are, in essence, probability assessments based on the same existing standards as the slotted athletes. In a normal year, those assessments are usually accurate. But, they’ve never been sold as guarantees. As was pointed out upstream, any number of things can upset that assessment - a mediocre essay, poor mid-term grades, and in some years - an unexpected number of competitive applications. And yes, there’s a certain amount of winking and nodding on both sides. I think it’s human nature that coaches want to be as optimistic as possible and that every family wants to walk away feeling their kid is a supported athlete.
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So, in that case “support” is what some call “tips”? But aren’t slots going to be used for the top 2 recruits regardless? WIth such schools, even those that are fully qualified academically can’t be fully sure they will get in through admissions without the coach’s backing.
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You said it better than I could have, though I think the nomenclature may differ between the Ivy League and NESCAC. For example, I think the word, “tip” is the Ivy way of saying, “slot” (I’m not trying to be mean, but, you’ll notice none of the posters whose students were deferred have said that their kids had a coach’s tip or slot.) The word you hear most often is support. And, what so often makes it confusing for parents is that the higher the level of support (as in, “You have my highest support”) the more the candidate usually needs that support because he or she may not have the most spikey academic credentials. So, a parent may walk away feeling that their kid is a shoo-in because they have the coach’s “full support” when all it really means is that the coach may have leveled the playing field a bit.
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Except this isn’t happening at other schools, including the other NESCACs. Generally, anyone going through recruiting understands how it works. That only Wesleyan recruits should somehow have misunderstood makes no sense.
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First, let me say that I am sorry for this experience. We went through it at another NESCAC, as have other posters here, so this is not just a “Wesleyan thing.”
Before we analyze things, let’s start with an understanding of slot and tips. Slots are admissions places given to a team, not - and this is important - to any given recruit. A slot allows a coach to recruit a player lower academically than the general population of applicants. When you hear of a recruit with a 29 ACT at Williams, you can presume it is a slot. By contrast, a tip is a player with the same level of academic prowess as other applicants, but coach support “tips” their application toward admission. With the exception of Football, NESCAC school allow around 2 slots per team per year. That 70 number referred to above is way too low, because it only includes slots. By way of comparison, Amherst admits a total of 127-57 recruited athletes each year, including both tips and slots, and because Amherst has fewer teams (25) than Wesleyan (28), it follows that the total number of athletic recruits at Wesleyan is somewhat higher than 127-57.
Most coaches can support around 5 recruits (both tips and slots) a year, although some like football have more. Assuming that indeed 25 recruits were deferred, it means that Wesleyan deferred somewhat less than 1 recruit a team - nowhere near ideal - but also not close to 1/3 of the entire class of recruited athletes either.
Having lived this, I do have some suggestions and I won’t go into the whole “it will end up for the best, anyway” thing. First, do find out from the coach what happened, and ask an honest assessment of chances for admission in ED2. Remind the coach that you were recruited elsewhere and relied on the positive pre-read to choose to apply to Wesleyan. For example, ask where you were on the list of athletes. If he says 5 of 5, that tells you a lot. If he says 3 of 5, but nos. 4 and 5 were admitted, I think it worthwhile to explore why that was. If you have no chance after deferral, the coach should tell you so that you can move on to greener pastures. Second, and I am not always the biggest fan of high school guidance counselors, but have your high school GC call admissions to ask them the same questions. Make sure to tell the GC about your positive pre-read. Right now, you need all the information so that you can decide your next step.
When this happened at another NESCAC, we bolted and things did work out way, way better. However, that might not be the right thing for you. Hang in there and don’t blame this on Wesleyan per se, as it does happen at other NESCACs. Remember in D3, an “oral commitment” is not worth the paper it is written on. The actual quid pro quo is coach support in exchange for applying early, not admission in exchange for applying early.
Whatever happens, whether at Wesleyan or elsewhere, it will be okay.
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Amherst admits a total of 127-57 recruited athletes
Does “127-57” mean somewhere between 127 and 157?
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Correct. Dropping the “1” in the 157 is one form of writing convention with which I am acquainted. Sorry if it was unclear.
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127-57 inclues slots and tips?
Thank you for the reply. Although the terms slots and tips weren’t used explicitly, that’s not exactly how one NESCAC coach explained it. They said that they could offer their “full support” (slots) to only their top recruits to help through admissions and they did that even for those that were likely to have gotten in on their own merit if they were also a top recruit. For other recruits, they indicated their “support” (tips) through admissions would improve the chances of admission much higher than normally, but they could not make any guarantees.
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Correct. I used the Amherst numbers because they appear in an official college report, as opposed to - say - the Bowdoin article which was written by a student. Look, pre-reads should have value, and 25 recruits seems pretty high to be deferred if they all had positive pre-reads. All I am saying is that we should get the denominator right.
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Didn’t Wes over-enroll by 150 or so? From 800 to 950?
But I’m not so sure that’s the case. It just so happens that this year a couple of parents posted their experience and expressed (understandably) their frustrations on this forum. The season isn’t done yet, and I personally know of this happening to a kid at Tufts, one at Skidmore, one at JHopkins, two at Bates, and one at Whitman, and that’s just the accident of my social circle 3,000 miles away from those schools (other than Whitman, which feels 3,000 miles away from Seattle). I think it comes down to an individual coach and individual family and communication/expectations. The parents of each of these kids were, after talking about it with me, less sure than they thought they were about what the coach said. Sure, I’m defending Wesleyan here a little bit, but only to the extent that there is still much we don’t know. At the risk of seeming insensitive and cynical, we have a poster who joined yesterday and posted a series of complaints about his kid/her kid and has now disappeared. Maybe he/she is busy, maybe he/she joined to “spread the word,” or maybe none of those things. Didn’t answer my question about what the coach said.
I only point this all out because, in my experience on the recruiting trail, things can get weird and petty and the rivalries in D3 can be more acrimonious and intense than one would think. I know you have a kiddo in D3 sports, so you probably know what I mean.
On the point about Haverford, I distinctly remember a few years ago that there was a rogue men’s LX coach who was frequently accused of playing recruiting games by recruiting kids he knew would not make it through admissions but did so anyway to lessen the odds those kids would show up on a rival roster. IDK if that was ever substantiated, but it was “out there.” Hard to believe an adult would do something like that, but being around youth sports for as long as I have, I’ve lost a little faith in humanity.
It always comes down to “what precisely did the coach say?” It’s ALWAYS that. Highest level of support/influence or not? If not, then anything truly goes.
But nomenclature/code words aside, I’ll be the first to call-out Wes if indeed 25 or more recruits receiving the highest level of support were denied.
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