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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I "walked on" to my Ivy college team. Coach didn't know or recruit me. I called when I got there and the coach said I could try out at fall ball along with a few others. I got lucky and made it. Everyone else was recruited or known to the coach and their admission was enabled by him. I was referred to the coaches as a "walk on" who worked harder than everyone else to make it.

But what do they know?[/quote]

The coaches were borrowing a term from the D-1 football world. I guess they found an accurate description --- people we didn't recruit or sponsored in the Admissions process who just showed up" --- to be too long.

Just because they used the term inaccurately, doesn't change what it means specifically. According to you, they used it to describe anybody they didn't recruit. Although the bar to being a "a recruit" is so low that it excludes few potential players. If you received a letter in one of the mass mailings and filled out the form and sent it in, you officially become a "recruit" regardless of what other contact you had with the coaching staff or whether you were one of the athletes the Athletic Department lobbied for in the admissions process.

What the term actually refers to is any athlete that receives no scholarship money.

In DI basketball, there are rarely more than 10 or so scholarship players even though they are allowed more. The rest of the team consists of "walk-ons" or non-scholarship players, who practice with the team and play only at the end of games when the outcome is no longer in doubt. Sometimes "walk-ons" in both football and basketball earn a scholarship and become scholarship players.

A "preferred walk-on" is a new term that has crept into the lexicon. It's a clever bit of marketing. It says to the "recruit", "We aren't going to give you any scholarship money. But we would like you to apply to our school and if you get in you are welcome to try out for the team. You are different from other "walk-ons" in our eyes."

The Ivies and Division III schools technically have no "Walk-ons" because they don't offer scholarships.

[/quote]

Does the coach weigh in with Admissions for the so-called "preferred walk-on"?[/quote]

They may. But keep in mind, they only have so many they can ask for and they have their own priority list. So they very well might have used up all their "chits" by the time they get to the end of their list.

Admissions wants to work with these coaches, but only up to a limit. And it varies by sport. At some schools, where lacrosse is a big deal, they might be more help from admissions for those programs.

This illustrates how nonsensical this idea of "walk-on" is in the non-scholarship world.

In order to get this, you have to have a pretty good understanding of the Ivy League Academic Index which other schools also use (e.g., the NESCACs) The AI is based on SAT scores and class rank. It is divided up into "bands". The distribution of athletes scores in these bands with this metric cannot be seriously different from the distribution of the overall student population. The AI differs by school. The AI is different for Penn than it is for Princeton because the  scores for the rest of the students is different.

High SAT and high class rank athletes are gold for these coaches because it helps them with the AI curve. They offset to a degree, the athletes in the lowest bands. This doesn't have to be for a team. It's for the entire class of athletes.

Whether or not schools use the AI or a version of it, Admissions is not usually going to allow the Athletic Department to load the freshman class up with kids that may struggle academically. In order to get this help from the coaches, you should be someone the coaches want to have. And the more they want to have you, the better chance you haave.

We have been through this whole thing in our family with multiple sons for multiple sports. It required me to do a great deal of reading and talking to people about the rules and the practice.

I'll leave you with some bits of advice.

First, become an expert on the rules and the practice. It's not that hard

Second, never believe what a parent tells you about the recruitment of their sons. Sometimes they don't know what they are talking about and very frequently they want to impress you with just how sought after their kid is. After all the reading I have done and with as many coaches we have had in our living room and as many paid visits the boys have taken, I can pretty quickly understand what is real and what isn't.

Third, understand what the coach's objectives are. There's a fair amount of dishonesty in college recruiting. And it's not so much outright lies as it is allowing you to think something's true that isn't necessarily so. If a school wants to bring in 12 lacrosse recruits, they may have two or three times that "on the line". They want everybody to apply. Even thought hey know they are more interested in some than others. In a coach's office they may have a whiteboard with all the kids they are recruiting ranked in terms of their priority (like the NFL draft). They probably aren't going to share that information with you even though it would be very useful to you.

Fourth, there are only two real tokens of interest. The first is a scholarship offer. The second is paid visit. These are financial commitments and they are only allowed so many. Even an in-home visit can be suspect. It may be a sign of great interest or it may be that the coach has a girlfriend in your town he'd like to visit.

Because non-scholarship schools don't offer scholarships, than only the paid visits are real signs of interest.[/quote]

You should open up a consulting business.  Good stuff.  Thanks.

So my son is a sophomore.  "They" (his club coaches, seconded by high school coaches) keep telling us  that skills-wise, he is in "low D-1" or more likely DIII territory.  We don't need the scholarhip money.  Just want to get him into his reach school.  Do we get anything by communicating to the college coach that all we really want from him is his thumb on the scale with Admissions?[/quote]

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