D3 College Running???

Pick a school you like for academic/possible major reasons, and if it's a DIII school, walk on and run. For DIII it's typically that simple, no? More often than not it's kind of like going out for your high school team. If you want to run...show up, pass a physical...and run.

apologies for asking but male or female times.

You can pretty much look up times posted for every athlete at every school to determine how competitive you might be

Depends entirely on the school.

Some competitive schools have walk on standards.

If you don't make the team you can always run club.

Oops, forgot to add that I'm a female

You will be given the opportunity to run at most D3 schools other than the most competitive. Many will be very glad to have you.

Get your miles up to 35-40 over the next year and your times will drop

Many large D1 schools have very active club teams as well that meet and train regularly and compete in meets.

ACADEMICS BEFORE ATHLETICS!

I´ve had many good runners follow that mantra because their academic aspirations were higher than their athletic ability. They could have easily run D-III, but chose to go to the best school they could & then run on the club team.

Meanwhile, I do think you have more ability in you . Your mileage is way too low. I think Alberto Salazar (at a NXN panel) said you shouldn´t even do workouts until you´re running, at least, 35 miles a week. (I think the video is on runnerspace.)

And, Joe Vigil said if you´re running less than 50 miles a week, there´s no need for a taper. I think he said, ¨What the hell are you tapering from!?!¨

You can over the next two months easily work-up to running 60 minutes daily & Saturday Long Run of 90 minutes.

Good luck!

The school I work for would be more than happy to recruit a female with those times

In 20 years you'll kick yourself if you pick a school simply because you'd be able to run on their squad.

If you don't get a full ride somewhere, go to a school that matches your academic and/or career interests. Run on the club team (our local university, Ohio State, has a super involved and competitive club team that could probably compete with a lot of DIII programs).

You can run at any D3 school, at least cross country. You aren’t fast enough to be recruited by the top schools. Academics first! If you improve 15ish seconds in the mile and 30ish in the 3200, you can get recruited.

You can run for some D1 schools (look at the NCAA regional times, add 4 minutes to your 5k time). However, you are likely more of a D2, D3 or NAIA runner. Pick schools that you would want to go to if running wasn't in the picture.

To get a coach's attention:

1. call them on the phone

2. go to campus and take a tour and let them know that you are on campus

3. set up an appointment with them when you are on campus

4. if you have connections to the team (other runners) have them put a good word in for you.

Unsure123 wrote:

I'm a junior in high school and as the new year approaches I've started looking at colleges. I love competitive running and definitely want to continue in college on a D3 team, but I'm not sure how realistic this dream is. I'm a strong academic student but not the top of my class. In track I mainly run the 2 mile, but recently ran the mile for the first time seriously. My team runs about 15-20 mpw if that helps with anything.

My current PRs:

Mile- 5:31

2 Mile- 12:02

5k- 20:08

I've reached out a few coaches but it's been three or four weeks and none of them have gotten back to me, so I was wondering how realistic my dream to run in college is.

Thanks!

If you are a female who can run 20:08 off 15 mpw (which is almost literally nothing, soccer players do more than this), then you should be faaaaaast if you put in miles. Try and get over 50 mpw this winter and next summer and you'll probably run around 18:30, which is scholarship territory.

Go to your state school to save money. Run on the club team. Otherwise I predict that you will run about a month and then quit.

Don't listen to the people immediately above me, either the one saying you're going to quit and should go to your state school, or the one saying to raise your mileage to 50.

Your mile time is significantly better than your 2 mile time, which makes sense, given that your mileage is so low. However, it sounds like you ran that time in December and ran the 2 mile time in the spring. That would indicate that you've improved since the spring, which is good. Keep running and enjoying the sport, hopefully get in contact with college coaches, and you should be ok. It would be good to stay on the upper end of your team's mileage range, and maybe get up to 25-30 miles per week (carefully!) if you can, but don't strain relations with your current coach or anything.

You have the times to run for a D3 school, and it sounds like the talent to turn out to be a significant performer once you adjust to college training. I don't think you would be able to run for a D1 or D2 school. Don't pick a school just based on where you can run, though! Choose your academics first, and where you feel like you'd be happy if you couldn't run, and then factor in running. I don't think you're quite fast enough to be recruited, but you have about a year to go until actual recruiting helps or doesn't help--a year in which you can still improve a lot.

What region are you interested in and what do you want to study?

minimom wrote:

What region are you interested in and what do you want to study?

Probably somewhere in the north for region. I’m not sure what I want to study yet, but I’m leaning towards either business or medicine.

If you have the grades, check-out some of the NESCAC programs. There are a few that you should hit standards for. Any NESCAC program would give you a great education.

For Business specifically, there's Babson and Bentley, both of which are exclusively business and very solid schools.

Just keep filling out recruiting forms, and see if you get any bites.

If you are looking for business, then Babson is definitely worth looking at. A great school with a descent team. I would reach out to their coach.

This was my suggestion to my son so feel free to ignore or follow. Either way, your times are fine and you'll do well.

There are about 1300 schools in the US with running programs. So start there. Then take out the ones you know you wouldn't go to unless they offered you a screaming deal. Like if you don't want to go out west, then rule them out - that's about 400 schools out of the picture. Then rule out over 30K students or under 2K students etc and that rules out so many more. Then keep going - cities or country etc. Get it down to 200 and you can then look at their times and learn about their programs. Just take it one step at a time. Good luck.

Western CT State just added a new program this fall. Their business school just got accredited as one of the top 8% in the world. Check them out. Tuition is very affordable