No.
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How many years does it take for the average person to each 95% of their potential limit in the 400m?
Some good input on this sub and you’ll find other subs with a lot of good Ivy T&F and other recruiting info.
I’m commenting as I had a kid that was a T&F recruit to HYP. They too started track a little late (multi-sport athlete) and I do remember a recruiting coach remarking about that, and it having some upside. That said, they more than met the T&F stats that they look for in recruits and were very strong academically. Meeting the recruiting standards (athletic and academic) are 99.9% of it.
Another note, there is a difference between being a recruited athlete in which the coach uses a slot or LL to help with admissions vs. being a walk-on. For T&F the coaches only get some many athletes that they can support so it is typically reserved for the top recruits. Many T&F teams have walk-ons that get admitted on their own without coaches support.
statistically speaking, being an Asian male will significantly diminish your chances of admission to any of the top universities - the opposite of “leniency”
where do you live geographically? if you reside in the northeast or California that is another huge knock against
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It sounds like you are really fast, but to provide some perspective . . . MilesplitUSA shows that 260 HS Seniors ran 49.00 or better during the Spring 2019 season. 755 ran 50.00 or better. They stopped ranking at 1000 who ran 50.32 or faster.
If academics at HYPSM eliminate 90% of HS athletes, you should still focus on getting your 400m below 50.00 and earning excellent grades. The good news for you is that most HS track athletes lost their 2020 outdoor seasons, so don’t worry that you are “behind” in the recruiting process. Just take care of business.
Agree. But track is a sport where dedication AND raw talent is a powerful combination. The elites are all pretty close often it’s someone you want to beat or some time you want to achieve that gets you there.
Injuries are common. So an athlete who had reached good times then had an injury and is still coming back will also be slower (though not always). In the top 5 anything goes, usually it’s the top one or two and the rest ( both long and short distance).
And long distance and short are different as well. Field events can change a lot with practice. Sprinters and long distance runners who are committed can also see times drop ( sometimes dramatically).
If you aren’t close to a specific time, you need to recognize that. Being a half-second away and being three seconds away is vastly different. Look online at scores by state and nationals. If there are lots of people in your time zone then you are unlikely to be a recruitable athlete. Those who meet the times also have to get accepted to the schools and be selected by the teams. So it’s not that easy.
No, it won’t. But if you really care for track and field, show your passion for it when you write your essays. That is the most valuable thing.
Also, genetic potential, in terms of speed, will usually be peaked quickly. I cannot put a number of years on it though. 2-3 years to reach 98% of potential is a reasonable guess. Raw speed is generally much harder to improve if you’ve already hit puberty. My friend, a distance runner, had always had slow raw speed, but he matured significantly during junior year and improved a 58.5 400 relay split to a 55. And as a result dropped a minute to run 15:39 for XC 5K. If you’re along the same lines, it might be easy to drop four seconds off your 400m time, especially if you tailor the training. However, if you find that you can’t improve, I encourage you to try out the 800m. You might be a phenom, you never know. A 52 is certainly sufficient to succeed at mid-d. A bit of aerobic endurance combined with 52-second speed is lethal.
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I tried the 800m, I am slightly better in the 400m.
I heard MIT is a division 3 school, and the requirements are 50-51
MIT coaches also have little to no pull with admissions.
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The only other prestigious universities I heard that are in Division 3 are Johns Hopkins and WashingtonU St Louis
There are many prestigious d3 universities (and even more prestigiousd3 liberal arts schools): The University of Chicago, Emory, Carnegie Mellon, washington University in St. Louis, NYU, Tufts, off the top of my head. You sound like you are at the beginning of learning about track recruiting and college admissions. Spend some time Googling, and reading old threads in the recruiting forum.
This is the downside of getting involved with MIT recruiting. The coach does work with admissions on top recruits, but even he would tell you that he can increase the odds to maybe 50/50 for a top recruit with the right scores and grades. So a little pull for a few recruits, but not anywhere close to what some other D3 coaches can do. A lot of recruits go for the near-sure thing elsewhere.
I don’t disagree with any of that, and track is not my area of expertise so I appreciate all of the advice you and others more experienced than me are giving (both for the OP and also to satisfy my personal curiosity).
I wasn’t trying to take anything away from track athletes or their dedication.
If the coach had one spot and had you and another guy with everything else being totally equal - gpa, scores, athletic times, etc - and the other guy had been running for years and his best time was the same as yours and you’d only been running and training for 6 months, I could see a scenario where the coach would take you over the other guy because you have more potential to continue to improve.
However, it’s unlikely the coach would give that support in admissions to either of you. Recruited spots go to those who are already top athletes, not to people the coach is hoping to develop. If you both got into the school on your own, and there is only one walk-on spot, then again I think the coach might look for which athlete had the most potential and that might be you. At that point, there is no ‘leniency’ or support to give - you’ve already been admitted based on your academic record, not athletic.
The possibility of two athletes being so identical is slim.
Meant to reply to this earlier, apologies. There’s too much variation for an average to tell you anything meaningful. But one full HS season should give a pretty good indication of your potential trajectory. A good HS coach can get a pretty good sense of 400m potential in just a few months. So I’d make contact with your HS coach and make sure to follow his or her training suggestions.
There are quite a few nuances in track recruiting but at a basic level coaches are focused on two questions: does the athlete have the speed needed to meet the demands of this event? And, does he respond to training?
So for a 400m guy running recruitable times, they’ll look at 100m and 200m times to get a sense of potential. If those look good, they’ll assess whether an athlete has shown a training response. Believe it or not, not everyone improves at the same rate, or even at all, from training. This variation in training response is what separates the top track athletes from the rest, and is one of the things coaches look at closely. It’s far more important than where or when an athlete starts.
In your case, you just need to get a season under your belt to see where you are. You might be one of those who starts the season at 52ish and finishes at 51.5. Or maybe you improve 2-3 seconds. You actually have to do the training to find out. Either way, if what you want is to run in college you’ll have options (whether it’s the team or the running club).
No opinion on the actual question asked, but I would like to point out that “not being accepted to HYPSM to run track” is not quite the same thing as a prison sentence, and thus maybe “lenience” is not quite the apposite expression.
Not advocating for the thread title to be changed, just suggesting that it might be healthier for you to reframe the question in your mind as “would they give me consideration”.
Fingers crossed for you to run like the wind this spring, and the question to be moot.