When should I fill out the online athletic recruitment forms?

<p>I'm a sophomore who's interested in swimming in college. I'm good, but not scholarship potential. I'm looking at LACs and while looking at the swimming websites there are recruit questionares to fill out. Should I fill them out now or wait until I'm a junior/ senior?</p>

<p>You can fill them out anytime, but it might be more useful to the coaches if you wait until next year and do it as a junior. You'll have more updated times to report then. If you're a sophomore there's no rush. My son first started filling those out and being contacted by coaches in his junior year. He also was interested in going to a D3 LAC, and it's worked out like that for him, as it turns out.</p>

<p>can i assume your son is a swimmer?
and also do you think being a good swimmer at a college which doesn't focus on sports as much(a D3 or D2 LAC) is a good thing at admissions or does it not really affect my chances</p>

<p>It won't get you into college singlehandedly (I was a D3 recruit, though not for swimming), but it'll certainly be a nice thing to have. </p>

<p>Wait until you have your standardized test scores. So if you take the SAT/ACT in March, you can probably start filling out the recruiting forms around April or May of Junior year. I waited until the fall of Senior year to do mine, simply because I wanted to have my SAT II scores (took those in June) and know for sure what colleges I was applying to before I put too much effort into it.</p>

<p>Have your college list really narrowed down or completely finished before you start the recruiting business. At the D3 level, it's really emphasized that you're a student-athlete, not an athlete-student, so it's important to really be familiar with the schools you're looking to swim at.</p>

<p>PS. As you're only a sophomore, I feel it's important to point this out- you may very well burn out by the time you're a senior. When I was a sophomore, I thought I was going to pursue lacrosse in college, but at the end of my junior year realized that while I loved the sport, I simply couldn't do it another 4 years. I could do it recreationally, but not competitively. So that's another thing to keep in mind.</p>

<p>In a D3 college where sports is not a big focus, I expect (but I don't know for sure) that being an athlete will be less of a factor in admissions, but perhaps it will still be some kind of factor. At the very least, an extended committement to anything (music, sports, art, community service, etc.) is a plus, so your swimming would still be a good thing in that regard.</p>

<p>Obviously at a school where the sports teams are a more significant part of the campus identity being an athlete would have more influence in admissions decisions. But also, just because sports aren't as well known a part of a school's public face, don't assume there aren't coaches there that really DO care and work hard to support and build their teams, and that those coaches can sometimes put in a useful word for you with admissions.</p>

<p>I think it's very hard to say anything too generally in D3 sports. I'm sure it varies from school to school, and even in one school from sport to sport.</p>

<p>There's a fairly recent (last couple weeks?) thread here on CC about recruiting that has a lot of good perspectives on D1 and D3 sports as they pertain to admissions. Someone posted links to a very good series of articles from the Pomona College newspaper that might address more specifically your question about LACs where sports are less of a focus than in some others. Pomona is, as I understand it, less inclined to specifically build up their sports team than some of the best known LACs in the northeast, for example.</p>

<p>See if you can hunt up that thread. There is a ton of information in it.</p>

<p>Many D3 schools DO focus on sports. While you have to have the grades and scores to support your application, sports are a huge help. Amherst, for example, has 66 places reserved for athletes. While I am sure that everyone recruited is also a good student, when you are vying against such a large pool of applicants, it can make an enormous difference. But, as to the OP, you can contact the coach whenever, but until your jr. grades and board scores are out, you can't really know whether you will be "recruitable" or not.</p>