ISO: Advice Re Athletic Recruiting

[Anonymous]

For those of you whose children are being or were recruited by college coaches, were you asked to do a 'pre-read'? Is this a legit request or smoke-blowing? Not sure how seriously to take these requests (ie, want to temper child's expectations, etc). Anyone have experience with that?

[Anonymous]

Pre-reads are a real thing, and they mean the coach is very interested in the kid. It isn’t an offer, but it is a step before.

Public schools don’t do pre-reads, as I just found out when my kid got an offer without a pre-read, but they do check in with admissions.

[Anonymous]

It’s legit and necessary if you want to move forward with a private school.

[Anonymous]

If you are on FB, I recommend joining Coach Renee’s page.

[Anonymous]

The pre-read is why athletes have an 85% acceptance rate at selective schools. That’s how they know you are qualified to be accepted before you even apply. Being asked to do it is a very good sign that they’re serious about recruiting you.

[Anonymous]

It's real. They won't give an offer if they don't think they can get your kid through admissions

[Anonymous]

At highly academic schools, coaches send information about athletes to admissions and get feedback. That feedback might be "Yes, you can use one of your spots for this player", or "Maybe, you can choose a couple players at this level, but not all of them." or "Yes, if they bring their GPA up, or get a certain test score" or "No, they don't meet our standards". Then once they have that information they choose who to admit. So, they might decide your kid is good enough to admit if they are a yes, but not if they are a maybe. Or they might submit for two goalies but only accept one.

There are some situations, like Duke Basketball, or Stanford swimming (these are guesses, just naming teams where they play at a very high level) where a coach might be given a lot of leeway, but that doesn't mean that the squash team gets the same leeway. There are other schools, like Ivies, or NESCAC, or JHU, where there isn't much leeway at all, and athletes need to be academically pretty similar to unrecruited admitted students.

There are a few schools, like MIT and Caltech, where a coach can encourage admissions to take an athlete but it's not a sure thing, even with positive preread.

So a preread doesn't mean he's in, but multiple prereads means he's got a good chance of getting into one of them.

[Anonymous]

A lot of schools limit the amount of prereads they will do for each coach. Take it as a good sign that the coach is willing to have one done for your dc

[Anonymous]

You should check out Coach Renee's FB page as it has more info than can be disseminated here.

Pre reads mean the coach is extremely interested and should only be done if the athlete is very interested in the school. Highly selective public schools also do pre reads. A pre read will be done prior to an athlete being offered a spot on the team and committing (and for highly selective schools, prior to an official visit). For my DCs pre reads, they had to send transcript, test scores and admission gave the go ahead for the official visit.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you are on FB, I recommend joining Coach Renee’s page.

+1 -- and get her book, too.

[Anonymous]

OP here. Thank you all very much. This is super useful. My ds has so far submitted his info for pre-reads 5 schools that requested it (two D1s and three D3s, public and private). All have come back as positive. I guess it's time to start taking this seriously... Gonna follow the FB rec as well. Many thanks.

[Anonymous]

OP again...There are a bunch of Coach Renee pages....What's her last name?

[Anonymous]

who is coach renee? there is a dearth of knowledgeable experts in this field, so would luv to find someone who actually understands the landscape

[Anonymous]

OP, what sport does your DS play? There are good sport-specific sources as well.

[Anonymous]

OP, if your kid has multiple positive prereads they will probably end up with multiple offers. The kid needs to decide what they want, since they’ll have options. D1 and D3 are very different experiences. What experience do they want?

Commitments for D1 are ongoing now (kinda late) and commitments for D3 are just starting. But your kid will almost certainly need to ED, and will probably want to commit to their chosen school well before ED deadline. So if they want to play…yes, time to pay attention.