Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:It's amazing to me just how uninformed people are and how many of their impressions are incorrect.
Consider the tiny coaching staffs of most DIII schools versus the ideas on there about DIII recruiting. Most of these schools have a head coach and maybe one or two assistants. The amount of time they can spend on or with a single protect is very limited because there are an ocean of prospects out there because of the growth of the sport.
They depend on casting a broad net and then hoping to find some interested prospects. Schools will send out hundreds letters to just about anyone they can find on any list they have. Those that return the completed questionnaire become possibilities.
They also depend on a few key contacts they have at certain schools. That might be an alum (Coaching or not coaching) or a head coach they have a history with. The idea here is to find a kid who can play at their level and that would actually consider their school. They may eventually vector in on a few top prospects and call them, send hand-written notes, etc.
Because DIII's don't give scholarships they have no real commitment to a prospect. What they want to do is to get as many kids to apply as they can and then try to sort it out with Admissions.
Agree with most of this post, except for the last sentence. A coach who says he will support a candidate for admission who cannot deliver the goods will not be a coach for long.
I guess in the very long-term.
But, any coach can say, "I worked hard to get your son in. but Admissions was unmoved".
And families are rarely going to share this experience with others. These are the same people who say their son "signed with" w D-III school when there is nothing to sign.
A coach has a list of prospects. He probably has them ranked by position (or at least arranged into tiers). Because they know SAT scores and GPA's and maybe even a guess at "ability to pay", they can prioritize their list.
They want everyone on that list to at least apply. And they are going to tell everybody on that list whatever they think they want to hear to get them to apply. In Division III, more is better.
In DIII, when they go to Admissions they are going to lobby for players based on their ranking against this list. They know they are only going to get so many.
In D1, because there are a finite number of paid official visits and scholarships (or fractions of scholarships), the sincerity of a coach is demonstrated more easily.