despite the great scores, you're applying to some of the hardest "gets" out there, so contact many schools and apply to several, not just 1 or 3. even if you adore those 3 and have good vibes. until they are telling you (a) you're in and (b) you're on the team.
re williams, there is no harm in contacting and trying with "limits" schools. see if they respond. see if they are encouraging. i shouldn't say don't bother, though i think you might be marginal to make the team at some. it's, when you organize who you're going to contact, do your research and include plenty of schools where your times are welcome and your likely roster status is straightforward.
every so often a kid comes on here and every application choice was overly ambitious, for academics and sports, and despite now wanting running (it often feels like they just decided as spring seniors, which is too late) no one is returning calls, they are admitted to 2 schools and maybe 1 program of the 10 they applied to even looks possible for sports. and it's not clear that school accepted them. game over on NCAA at least near term.
in that context, if you want to be sure you run someplace, identify some no limits schools, have some in the mix until the end. and also contact limits schools but err on those in favor of ones with positive recruitment feedback. and then when application time comes, generally speaking, apply to schools whose coaches want you. and if you want to throw in some great schools where you don't run, so be it. but control the process and get what you want out of it.
re PP/CMS, we used to play them and i sometimes thought i'd made a mistake. pomona and CM are top 10 LAC schools. PP was top 3 nationally in XC, won their region and conference, second in conference in outdoor track this year. CMS won track conference and was slightly behind PP at conference/regional/nationals in cross. they do that while also carrying kids with >5 miles back end of the roster. the conference is liberal in terms of how many you can enter at conference meets. maybe it's all the schools are in the LA neighborhood so teams don't have to put everyone on a plane or long bus ride for conference. that and PP can sneak kids into pitzer who can't get in pomona.
my general sense was/remains that for d3 schools the picky/snooty thing is a NE/mid-atlantic fetish. west coast is usually no limits (PP, CMS, colorado college). south is usually no limits. midwest is usually no limits (carleton, macalester, grinnell). despite having big sports budgets and some small schools it's the NE and mid-atlantic where you may need to get in touch early and fight for roster room, depending which school we're talking about.
i tend to do the PP drumbeat because it's (a) more in the spirit of d3 and (b) when you have some kid pouting nescac and UAA aren't returning their calls, it's like, do you know this place exists, it's similar academic ranking, beats them in sports sometimes, and yet same kid same times better answer from the coach.
Don’t let anyone discourage you from sending an email to the schools you are considering. This is a busy season for coaches, but this is their job. Trust me, it’s good to at least get on the coach’s radar, even if your times are outside a “preferred admissions slot.” I’ll mention the way admissions works at all three schools for recruits is slightly different. Even if they get back to you and say your times are outside what they’d recruit for, there’s no harm in getting in touch and updating them as you progress. Again, good luck.
I don't disagree that Williams is in a beautiful location as far as the Berkshires are concerned. That said, it is hard to figure out where any of that endowment money is directed. The outdoor track itself is decent, but everything else is HS level at best. Middlebury has a much nicer indoor facility as does Colby? At least I have heard that about Colby. I guess I don't understand why schools with endowments larger than most state university systems have such poor facilities. Williams is not a research university, and has tiny numbers, so where do they invest the money? Why not invest in the campus? The main street has maybe two restaurants on it. The main athletic facility is worse than many HS facilities. The soccer fields are poor with no permanent bleachers. These thing actually matter for students who are going to spend four cold years there. You have to really believe in the brand to be interested. If it was ranked 150th nobody would give it a second thought. And in appearance it looks like it is ranked 150th. Never seen such a disconnect between whats on paper and what you see.
re PP/CMS, we used to play them and i sometimes thought i'd made a mistake. pomona and CM are top 10 LAC schools. PP was top 3 nationally in XC, won their region and conference, second in conference in outdoor track this year. CMS won track conference and was slightly behind PP at conference/regional/nationals in cross. they do that while also carrying kids with >5 miles back end of the roster. the conference is liberal in terms of how many you can enter at conference meets. maybe it's all the schools are in the LA neighborhood so teams don't have to put everyone on a plane or long bus ride for conference. that and PP can sneak kids into pitzer who can't get in pomona.
my general sense was/remains that for d3 schools the picky/snooty thing is a NE/mid-atlantic fetish. west coast is usually no limits (PP, CMS, colorado college). south is usually no limits. midwest is usually no limits (carleton, macalester, grinnell). despite having big sports budgets and some small schools it's the NE and mid-atlantic where you may need to get in touch early and fight for roster room, depending which school we're talking about.
i tend to do the PP drumbeat because it's (a) more in the spirit of d3 and (b) when you have some kid pouting nescac and UAA aren't returning their calls, it's like, do you know this place exists, it's similar academic ranking, beats them in sports sometimes, and yet same kid same times better answer from the coach.
this is mostly right, but as someone who went d3 in the uaa, i can't exactly say that pp/cms are going to move the needle trying to get a career in the tech world in the same way that, say, cmu would
like anything else, just depends on what you want to do
I don't disagree that Williams is in a beautiful location as far as the Berkshires are concerned. That said, it is hard to figure out where any of that endowment money is directed. The outdoor track itself is decent, but everything else is HS level at best. Middlebury has a much nicer indoor facility as does Colby? At least I have heard that about Colby. I guess I don't understand why schools with endowments larger than most state university systems have such poor facilities. Williams is not a research university, and has tiny numbers, so where do they invest the money? Why not invest in the campus? The main street has maybe two restaurants on it. The main athletic facility is worse than many HS facilities. The soccer fields are poor with no permanent bleachers. These thing actually matter for students who are going to spend four cold years there. You have to really believe in the brand to be interested. If it was ranked 150th nobody would give it a second thought. And in appearance it looks like it is ranked 150th. Never seen such a disconnect between whats on paper and what you see.
Daughter a recent Williams grad. For a student body of 2000, facilities more than adequate. It even has a top 10 ncaa golf course. Money? If you ask right, school will fully fund just about any project.
If you want student/athlete experience NESCAC is great. For fancy facilities go SEC.
Williams is polarizing only because it really is in the middle of nowhere. If you like a remote campus, hiking, rafting, skiing, trail running, the Berkshires are spectacular. If you want a city, you are going to hate it.
As a parent, there are actually plenty of nice places to stay and eat within a 30 minutes radius. You have the entire Berkshires tourism area, all around. In Summer the Williamstown Theatre Festival brings Broadway comunity to town. Tanglewood brings out the Boston music scene.
We are an outdoors family and absolutely love this area. Middle of nowhere, but only 3hr drive from either NYC or Boston.
One thing to keep in mind, as you investigate D3 is that you will need to apply Early Decision to your top choice to lock up as spot as a recruited athlete.
Your times are not fast enough to guarantee a coach is going to help you get admitted, but in your case you don't really need much help.
As you visit schools and talk to coaches, you need to find a coach who says "Well, you are not really fast enough to recruit, but I'd sure like to have you on the team."
When that Coach submits his 'recruits' to the AD and admissions, yours gets included, just not with a bump. The coach just finishes his presentation with you. A guy fast enough for team, but not getting coaches help. 'You'll note his academics are excellent, and we would like him on the team too.'
The ED commitment from you, your stats, and simple coach's desire to have you can still get you admitted.
Good luck! I like your idea for Claremont colleges as well.
You need to be a lot faster to get help with admissions. Williams is getting guys who can run 9 flat. Tbh, if you want to run varsity somewhere, all of these schools are out of reach until you make big improvements.
You need to be a lot faster to get help with admissions. Williams is getting guys who can run 9 flat. Tbh, if you want to run varsity somewhere, all of these schools are out of reach until you make big improvements.
Does anyone here read? On His stats are 4.0 GPA unweighted, 1560 SAT and 36 ACT. He can pay for college.
If he puts together a decent app, especially with some research project, these creds could get him into MIT and CalTech!
Guy does not need help getting in, he just wants a roster spot and a chance to continue running.
I see your point. I had family go to Williams and it is a beautiful area. I still can't wrap my head around the fact that it has an endowment the size of UNC, bigger than Wisconsin and UC Berkeley and the size of NC State and CU Boulder combined. Would anyone ever guess that visiting campus? When you open the rusty doors to the gym? Why the hesitation to fully support sports rather than have then as a prep school add on? Is this just the culture of NESCAC? The academics get wound up when sports are promoted? As though the two cannot co-exist? Giving roster issues in D1 I think there is a huge opportunity for a D3 to fully embrace sports and academics both.
re PP/CMS, we used to play them and i sometimes thought i'd made a mistake. pomona and CM are top 10 LAC schools. PP was top 3 nationally in XC, won their region and conference, second in conference in outdoor track this year. CMS won track conference and was slightly behind PP at conference/regional/nationals in cross. they do that while also carrying kids with >5 miles back end of the roster. the conference is liberal in terms of how many you can enter at conference meets. maybe it's all the schools are in the LA neighborhood so teams don't have to put everyone on a plane or long bus ride for conference. that and PP can sneak kids into pitzer who can't get in pomona.
my general sense was/remains that for d3 schools the picky/snooty thing is a NE/mid-atlantic fetish. west coast is usually no limits (PP, CMS, colorado college). south is usually no limits. midwest is usually no limits (carleton, macalester, grinnell). despite having big sports budgets and some small schools it's the NE and mid-atlantic where you may need to get in touch early and fight for roster room, depending which school we're talking about.
i tend to do the PP drumbeat because it's (a) more in the spirit of d3 and (b) when you have some kid pouting nescac and UAA aren't returning their calls, it's like, do you know this place exists, it's similar academic ranking, beats them in sports sometimes, and yet same kid same times better answer from the coach.
this is mostly right, but as someone who went d3 in the uaa, i can't exactly say that pp/cms are going to move the needle trying to get a career in the tech world in the same way that, say, cmu would
like anything else, just depends on what you want to do
it's a fair point. in d3 schools there's like a UAA/hopkins/caltech/MIT/etc. premed/STEM/CS/engineering path and then a LAC path. i was assuming LAC options based on the ones he suggested.
I see your point. I had family go to Williams and it is a beautiful area. I still can't wrap my head around the fact that it has an endowment the size of UNC, bigger than Wisconsin and UC Berkeley and the size of NC State and CU Boulder combined. Would anyone ever guess that visiting campus? When you open the rusty doors to the gym? Why the hesitation to fully support sports rather than have then as a prep school add on? Is this just the culture of NESCAC? The academics get wound up when sports are promoted? As though the two cannot co-exist? Giving roster issues in D1 I think there is a huge opportunity for a D3 to fully embrace sports and academics both.
I'm not sure I understand what's lacking. Year after year, Williams wins the D3 total sports cup. They are competitive in league and at ncaa level in every sport. The facilities, even what's available to a non athlete, allow you to do anything you need. (Cryotherapy not available, lol)
If poor facilities were hurting admissions, or recruiting, they would invest more, but applicants continue to increase and sports do well.
In fact the biggest criticism of Williams in academic circles is that it is too much of a jock school with 33% of student body on a varsity team.
Perhaps, you are just trolling, but you don't choose Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona, Bowdoin or Carleton for sports. Academics is the priority, and sports is great as a sidekick, especially if your team is competitive.
Williams just set aside $100 million for a new art museum and rec center (not sure if this is a gym), plus they recently invested in a giant new library. So they are continually developing the campus.
re NESCAC the issue i see is he'd probably not make the team on the top 3 (williams amherst bowdoin) for running but make a lot of the others, CC/trinity, colby/bates, hamilton. if your dream is broadly "NESCAC" that would still do, and some of those are better than others. if your dream is running at the best academic school possible, yeah, swat, haverford, PP/CMS, UAA, vassar, carleton, macalester, grinnell, the big engineering schools.
UAA some of the schools are limits and would sniffle at his times, some not. like he doesn't make NYU but maybe makes brandeis.
but i wouldn't take that as gospel, i'd email anyone i am interested in at d3, i'd just be aware of the nature of the team as coach responses filter in or not. if i really badly wanted to run, my ED school would be one the coach wants me, most or all of the normal application schools same.
I am actually sincerely confused by the ethos on display there. Academics and sports can co-exist. Sports are clearly very secondary at Williams despite it's reputation with NESCAC as sporty. Sports and academics find great synergy at Notre Dame, Stanford and Duke. Even Wake Forest has a better balance. Sure they are doing well, with it being harder than ever to get in to. But, why exactly? Purely because it is seen as an elite institution that produces a life time of connections. The actual "product" on display is pretty poor, shockingly poor given its resources. You could do a campus visit, be told that it was struggling to stay open and easily believe it. This despite having a 5 billion dollar endowment. The disconnect is very real there and it clearly rests on its reputation. Isn't there an opportunity to boost D3 and create smaller versions of Duke or Notre Dame with real facilities, higher level competition and real student support? There seems like such an opportunity wasted throughout these NESCAC schools who could change with the time, but instead cling to this dated outlook that is only present in the second tier Ivies.
I am actually sincerely confused by the ethos on display there. Academics and sports can co-exist. Sports are clearly very secondary at Williams despite it's reputation with NESCAC as sporty. Sports and academics find great synergy at Notre Dame, Stanford and Duke. Even Wake Forest has a better balance. Sure they are doing well, with it being harder than ever to get in to. But, why exactly? Purely because it is seen as an elite institution that produces a life time of connections. The actual "product" on display is pretty poor, shockingly poor given its resources. You could do a campus visit, be told that it was struggling to stay open and easily believe it. This despite having a 5 billion dollar endowment. The disconnect is very real there and it clearly rests on its reputation. Isn't there an opportunity to boost D3 and create smaller versions of Duke or Notre Dame with real facilities, higher level competition and real student support? There seems like such an opportunity wasted throughout these NESCAC schools who could change with the time, but instead cling to this dated outlook that is only present in the second tier Ivies.
fwiw, i think washu, mit, and emory all do this pretty well
they're all extremely strong academically and have 5-6 top 10 programs on both sides of ledger
now, it's obvious why this is -- they're getting d1-ish talent simply because a lot of talented kids know that they're not going pro and would therefore like to get the best education possible, as opposed to going low-d1. but to your point, those schools invest into athletics to ensure that they will attend and get an enjoyable experience there too.
successful d3 programs are weird -- it's (mostly) either academic wastelands that are way too big or in states with no d2 at all (uw-lax) or top-of-the-line academic schools with money to spend (mit, washu, etc)
I am actually sincerely confused by the ethos on display there. Academics and sports can co-exist. Sports are clearly very secondary at Williams despite it's reputation with NESCAC as sporty. Sports and academics find great synergy at Notre Dame, Stanford and Duke. Even Wake Forest has a better balance. Sure they are doing well, with it being harder than ever to get in to. But, why exactly? Purely because it is seen as an elite institution that produces a life time of connections. The actual "product" on display is pretty poor, shockingly poor given its resources. You could do a campus visit, be told that it was struggling to stay open and easily believe it. This despite having a 5 billion dollar endowment. The disconnect is very real there and it clearly rests on its reputation. Isn't there an opportunity to boost D3 and create smaller versions of Duke or Notre Dame with real facilities, higher level competition and real student support? There seems like such an opportunity wasted throughout these NESCAC schools who could change with the time, but instead cling to this dated outlook that is only present in the second tier Ivies.
Williams does not compete with ND, Duke, Stanford and Wake Forest. It competes with other NESCAC, then Hopkins, Chicago, Swat, Carleton, the Claremont schools and Wash U. To some extent also the Ivies.
For remote 'outdoor interest' Northeast academics, it's Williams, Dartmouth, Hamilton, Colgate, Middlebury and Colby.
No athlete is choosing between ND, Stanford, Duke.... and Williams. D1 level is just vastly superior in sports. Even in academics the attraction of a SLAC is tiny class sizes, only dealing with Professors, and demanding peer group. 500 kids per class is like a big high school.
The arms race for sports is exactly the reason the Ivies and all the D3 schools decided to not even offer scholarships. Focus on academics, offer sports as part of education.
I also still fail to see what Williams lacks, other than apparently a rusty hinge at the gym. It does suffer from the road that splits the campus, but other than that unfortunate eyesore, it's really a pretty spectacular campus. Especially, for a student body of only 2000. The facilities are small, but so is the number of fans. Football, basketball and hockey sites do the job.
I do think with shrinking roster sizes, more 4:10/9:15 kids might consider D3. It won't be important enough though for the top 10 d3 schools to feel a need to invest big in sports.
With roster limits on the horizon more and more talented runners who want high academics will seek refuge in D3. Yet, the athletic drop off to D3 is enormous from a facilities and student support perspective. They may very well be students who would have had a walk on shot at Notre Dame turning to these D3's as there are not many super high academic D1 schools that will be athletically attainable. This highlights the woeful nature of athletic support throughout NESCAC which is really just an extension of the east coast prep school model. For a school with a 5 billion dollar endowment, Williams offer very little for an athlete. The rusty recreation center doors are a metaphor for their support of sports. The "academics" at this school and throughout NESCAC must wield a lot of influence, as there is nothing to say sports and academics cannot function together. They literally do tow their bleachers out to fields before games with no permanent bleachers for some sports. They literally do house their coaches in something akin to a strip mall. Their ice rink is terrible. There is a marginal nod to sports culture, but nothing more. In a truly competitive marketplace, their product would fail. It is only because of the perception of prestige and outcomes that it sustains itself the way it does. Waiting for a mini Duke or Notre Dame to spring up in D3 and become the hot school that people want to attend.