High Academic Recruiting
This assumes a prospective student-athlete has a high GPA and/or Test Score
How do I get recruited by a high academic school?
High academic recruiting is harder. There are generally less supported admission spots at high academic schools and so large recruiting classes are very seldom seen. That means coaches have less spots to offer and higher criteria for finding players who fit specific needs in a team. So not only do you need to to be a fit academically but you also need to solve a more specific recruiting need and that program has less of a chance to mass recruit large recruiting classes.
There is also the academic piece. Often times at high academic schools there are minimum thresholds that are placed on applicants that must be a ‘floor’ of academic standards. Typically this is seen in an academic index or a weighted average of a PSA’s GPA and test scores.
What is an academic index?
An academic index is an excel formula that calculates a number for each student typically based on a weighted percentage of unweighted GPA and test score. Most high academic and colleges/universities across the United States have put more emphasis on the test score as a better predictor of college success than the high school GPA. The reason for this is the difficulty in measuring one high school vs another vs another in Germany for example. That being said, with optional testing being a new norm in the Coronavirus Era the weight of the GPA and classes you take to challenge yourself academically will be looked at more than ever now.
It does NOT matter if you test 8 times in the eyes of most athletic college admissions and often times schools or athletic admissions or academic scholarships awards will permit superscoring of an SAT or ACT so test as time, money, and opportunity allows. It can only help.
How does it work in the Ivy League?
As generally as I can provide it here was my experience in the Ivy League. Let’s say there are about 150 supported admission spots (not exact) permitted for athletic admissions each year per university in the Ivy League (remember there is no athletic scholarship or academic scholarships in the Ivy League). Each university in the Ivy League can decision how many supported admission spots each sport gets. This means each sport is supported differently at each university in the league and the number of available spots per year will vary based on the institution and sports. There is also an academic index (AI) that must be met by each sport and set by the institution. For men’s soccer at Penn we had 7-8 supported admission spots per year and an average AI that was about average for most Ivy sports. The important thing to note is that of the 7 incoming athletes we could recruit we had to average all 7 of their individual academic index scores together and meet or preferably beat that AI number provided to us by the university.
What this means:
A PSA had to fit the soccer positional need and fit into our average academic index score needed for that year. Sometimes a player could be a whale to us who would be a project player but had a huge test score and GPA and balloon up our average academics so that we could go find the creative attacking mid with a little less than stellar academic scores. That on top of graduation and the inevitable couple of kids who quit made us constantly churning our recruiting database looking for the right pieces to fit in our academic index and soccer needs for the class.
How high academic programs are different and how it affects PSA’s
Admissions differs in that a spot at a high academic in DI, DII or DIII is much harder to come by. There are no 15 man or women recruiting classes and rosters can focus more of developing what you have as opposed to over recruiting what you have at larger schools or schools without limitations on admissions. As a PSA you need to know this because just having high academics doesn’t mean you can play at high academic school or in the Ivy League but it does give you a chance at being someone they look at.
Admissions windows close early at high academic schools as well. This means that in January many high academic schools won’t allow applications and thus pushes high academic recruiting earlier by about 6 months as compared to schools with rolling admission who can admit students even months before the Fall season would start. If Messi came to Harvard in February of his senior year in high school and wanted to play soccer they would not be permitted to allow him to apply as he would have missed the application window.
Big Takeaways:
Testing is important. If you can, test early and often.
Spots at high academic programs are harder to come by
Just because you have high academics does not mean you are going to be recruited but it does give you a chance
You can ask coaches at high academic programs how many spots they are permitted or how admissions allows them to recruit
After the large high-profile college recruiting scandal universities want to see the track record of communication and recruitment to prevent poor recruiting and future scandal
College coaches view a supported admission spot as an equivalent to a large scholarship player
If want a high academic college start your recruiting process earlier