Recruiting for junior girl, preferably southeast or mountain west

What schools did her teammates get scholarships at?

I would like to know also. My daughter was faster with better grades and test scores but no scholarship. Betting he doesn't provide school names because some of us will be able to disprove it.

Here is a little advice and reality check for aspiring collegiate runners and their parents.

Most programs are nowhere near fully funded. Money is tight and coaches are penny pinchers. The average all-state level high school talent is getting a 20% ride. Most other runners are getting book money or a roster spot - that’s it. With the extra COVID eligibility, many of their prior fiscal commitments are now having to be honored for another year or two.

Schools get a ton of recruiting forms and e-mails each week. If your daughter wants to stand out, then she needs to call the coach and make a pitch herself. Be forewarned, it has to be her. Coaches do not want this process driven by parents as that is a red flag. Just like looking for a job, she needs to be persistent and differentiate herself from the other bland inquiries.

Be realistic. Coaches are looking at track times, not XC. Courses vary and are often short. Unless she is competing at known events like NXN or Champs Sports/Eastbay, it doesn’t register. Track matters and her times thus far do not indicate that she is a game changer or program cornerstone.

Coaches are busy while in season. Unless the program has a dedicated recruiting coordinator, you will not hear anything until the XC or Track campaign is over.

Having a B average for high school work is not a disqualifier, but it will cause concern for some coaches. D1 sports are a grind and college academics are more rigorous. Weirdly, programs that finish in the middle and lower ranks like to boast about their conference all-academic honorees since they do not win on the field. A coach can attain a certain job security by filling his roster with classroom achievers that don’t embarrass themselves competitively. Those athletes are getting academic money and he doesn’t have to spend athletic capital on them. They are happy to extend their athletic careers for little or no cost to the program.

If your athlete is not a junior yet, coaches may not have any contact regarding competitive opportunities.

Tell her to keep working hard in both sport and academics. Just temper your expectations and devise a funding plan because only a select few get the almost mythical full ride in this sport.

Those are definitely decent times. How is your daughter contacting the coaches. My daughter had similar times as a Junior (5:00, 10:45, 17:45) but had a XC state championship (largest class) on her resume.

Based on her preferences (distance, climate, campus, enrollment size, etc) we narrowed down to about 20 D1 schools and emailed the coaches the spring of her Junior year. Don't remember exact numbers, but at least 75% of the coaches responded. She was also contacted by a few coaches. She ended up talking to about 10 on a regular basis through the summer and fall.

Ultimately we made 3 official visits and 1 unofficial visits to 4 Power 5 schools. 2 made her offers and probably would have gotten a 3rd offer but she made her decision pretty early. On a side note, a smaller D1 school offered her a full ride but her heart was set on going to a big school. Between academic and athletic scholarships, we are left with 20% of tuition out of pocket plus room and board.

One other thing to note -- Covid definitely had an impact on recruiting. The extra year of eligibility put a pretty big dent in the money the coaches had to play with.

What year? Sounds similar to my daughter's stats but nearly no coaches responded to her and she received no offers. Guessing if touvare honest, it was before Covid. What schools made the offers?

Daughter graduated in 2022. To retain her anonymity, I am not going to name the schools that made offers, but they were from the Big 12 and SEC conferences. Smaller school that made the full ride offer was MVC school.

I agree with You Have To Play the Game -- money is definitely tight and the most my daughter got offered from the big Power 5 schools was 15%. However she qualified for significant academic aid at both schools. One final consideration is the additional $5,980 money that the Alston court case has made available for schools to pay athletes. Last I checked, 9 SEC, 5 Big 12, and several other Power 5 schools have implemented programs to pay their athletes the full amount tied to academic achievement. This was a welcome surprise and further reduced our total cost.

I am surprised that your daughter got no responses from coaches if she was sub 5. I am a data geek and started tracking the stats of the 2022 runners to get a picture of where my daughter ranked. It has now become a hobby. Based on my tracking, there were 173 sub-5 girls (including 1500s and full miles converted to 1600) in the 2022 class. 159 ended up at D1 schools, 5 at D2, 1 D3, and 1 NAIA. Of the remaining 7, 2 took Soccer scholarships. So only 5 did not end up at a school that I could find. I am not saying that they all got scholarships, but they all committed and were not walk-ons.

Top conferences were:
ACC 25, PAC-12 22, BIG-12 20, SEC 18, IVY 17, BIG-10 16, WCC 6, and MID-AMERICAN 6

I hope your focus is 100% on the best future for your daughter and not on saving the most money. A lot of parents get that confused in the recruiting process; easy to lose focus on what is important. Becomes an ego thing.

I say this as someone who has been through the NCAA D1 recruiting rigmarole.

Please clarify… is your daughter a junior or a rising junior? Since it’s mid-year I’m not understanding if you mean she’s currently a sophomore or currently a junior.

As to your question, it depends on what you mean by significant money….

There probably will be some money available for her but it may not be at a school that sounds good to her friends.

Intriguing. But you missed some because I just l0oked in Milesplit. There were more than 200 seniors who broke 5 in the spring when counting 1500, 1600, mile indoor and outdoor. There are many more who broke 5 in prior years even though they didn't do it senior year.
I am another one who has a daughter in the same boat. She is a senior who ran just over 5 minutes in the spring on 20 MPW. She is not quite as good at cross country as some of the other 5 minute 1600 girls though. We went through the process with her brother a few years ago. He ran 4:20 as a junior and 4:15 as a senior. He received more interest than she is receiving. He received a walk-on spot at a power 5 school that does not have a very good track of cross country team. My daughter has not real interest currently and she is very nervous at the moment. Some of the other parents and girls here sound like they are going through the same thing. My daughter contacted many coaches via email or by completing their questionnaire. She did about a dozen in the summer to her favorite schools but received no responses. She expanded her search to about 50 schools later in the summer. One Ivy responded and 2 mid majors but no Power 5 schools responded. About October, she contacted even more schools. She has been offered no official visits. She hasn't even been really offered a roster spot anywhere. The few coaches who have responded have all told her to wait until track season and they will reassess if they have a roster spot. This makes it very difficult to apply to colleges and make decisions. She is at the point where she is likely to apply to a few top academic schools and give up running. She has a very high ACT and is a 4.0 student so she is likely to be accepted to nearly any school. I admit that I expected the process to be easier for a girl than it was for our son. It is sad to think that her career may come to an end when I think she is capable of being a 4:20 1500 runner in college if she gets her mileage up to 40 MPW.

Doubtful. My daughter ran 5:12 1600m, traveled to Africa and holds the Guinness book of world records for running upside down. she is still having trouble finding a roster spot. We are loaded though so she doesn’t have to work.

Always nice to have people jump in and distract from the discussion rather than trying to help people.

Curious results for your daughter. A couple of questions...

1) When you say just over 5 mins... do you mean under 5:05 or is it more like 5:10? I'm not asking to try to determine who your daughter is, just trying to understand what you mean by just over 5 mins.

2) When did your daughter run this time... early in HS or as a junior?

3) Financially do you need scholarship money? This is a key question. It's understandable if you do, college is expensive, but, if not, there are plenty of schools out there who would be happy to have your daughter on their team.

4) What I always see is that many HS seniors have certain schools in mind and have trouble moving to other schools because they don't sound as good. Where is your daughter's thought process on this?

Ultimately, if she is flexible there will be options out there for her. She has time. There are good academic schools out there with running programs that aren't name programs who would be happy to have her. Many recruits sign very late in the process. Hang in there. (btw, college coaches miss all the time on recruits... it's not an exact science.)

She ran about 5:15 as frosh, 5:06 as sophomore, 5:02 as junior. She should get significant academic help based on her ACT and GPA. She reached out to so many schools. She would be one of the fastest girls at some of the schools and the coaches didn't even bother to respond.

How are you contacting coaches? I just went through the recruiting process with similar times and it is actually super easy. I even reached out to bigger programs that I would be walking on to and they all reached back out…..Are you emailing the head or assistant coach? What are you saying in the initial email?

I will give you my daughters story. I am not an expert but a dad and I a also a HS XC coach. So I think I have a decent amount of insight. Approx PR's so not to give too much away.. 1600-4:55-4:58... 3200 sub 10:55. 5k Track 17:45-55..Times from JR year... multiple state champs senior year.. small state. She has always known what she wanted to major in.. 4.0 plus GPA with AP classes... honestly not sure SAT.. but it was good not great. I believe she would have had a shot at Ivy league ( not a shoo in admissions obviuosly) but she did not want that route....

After her sophomore year we looked at schools in mid major conferences that had her major.. she filled out questionnaires to a lot of those .. probably 15-20. She followed up with an email to ones she was interested most in. Heard from some that summer but more junior year and it was tough with Covid.

She wanted mid major as she wanted to contribute and thought it was they way to get the most $$..A lot of phone calls, emails, texts etc.. did a bunch of unofficial visits, even some random walk arounds not even seeing coaches to see what she thought of campus. She eventually narrowed it down to three schools did official visits early in senior year ( 2 of the three we had also done unofficial visits with). got offers between 85-95 percent when you COMBINED athletic and academic. She chose the one we (my wife and I )kind of thought she would from Day one, but I feel we really did our due diligence and looked at various conferences even parts of the country. She completed her Freshman XC season and is loving it thus far

I think figuring out what you want to study then doing questionnaires followed up by an email works very well. It is what i suggest to athletes I coach.

This is our 2nd time going through the process because we went through it with her brother. She mostly fills out the recruiting questionnaires but also has sent emails directly to coaches. Even the few coaches that responded told her to keep in touch during track season. No offers for visits. My daughter is a great team member and great student. She won the cross country most inspirational team member award this year. Any coach that speaks to her will love to have her.

Which schools responded to you?