Can Ivy League coaches influence admissions?

i would assume they can and do. it's called the recruiting track & xc coach "goes to bat" with admissions department. not sure it's prolly a little different at each school but this is general way

I'm told that the coaches submit a letter to admissions with a list of names that they would like to have on their team. Then admissions can take extra consideration when viewing these applicants, but it is not a guarantee the people on the list get in. At least this is what my coach told me and I went to an Ivy.

Is Ed "Too Tall" Jones too tall?

I just finished going through this process and yes the coaches have a number of slots they can use to help get you into the school. The faster you are the better the chance is they will use a slot on you. I only took the SATs once and scored in the mid 600s and most of the schools were thrilled with that. I was looking at most of the ivys and a few other highly ranked schools.

very recruited athlete is assigned an academic number by the schools admissions office. The academic number is based mostly on test scores (SAT or ACT) and GPA, there might be some consideration given to course load, but I\'m not positive. It\'s important to note though, that the coaches don\'t know everyone\'s exact academic number, so they have to estimate it based on the information an athlete provides them. [Also important to note: extracurricular, community service, NHS, and that stuff that kids kill themselves over in high school doesn\'t really matter for recruited athletes.]

On each team, every recruiting class has to average a certain academic number specific to that sport. For instance, cross country runners tend to be good students, so the average academic number a cross country recruiting class must achieve is relatively high, whereas men\'s hockey or football is on the relatively lower end.

Generally what happens is coaches try to recruit smart kids who are also fast, but they also recruit some really smart kids who aren\'t so fast, and some really fast kids who aren\'t so smart. The goal is to have most recruits at or above the average academic number, with one or two recruits with a much higher academic number in order to get a couple of studs with a lower academic number. The admission\'s office will normally let around 10 cross country runners per gender receive a coach\'s endorsement, and it those ten guys who get their numbers averaged.

So, the game plays out like this: It\'s best to be smart and fast. But if you\'re not so fast, you can still get in by being smart so long as you\'re just fast enough that a coach will support your application. And if you\'re not that smart, but you\'re really fast, a coach will still want you and they will try to get some smart recruits to offset your lower academic number. I also think there\'s a minimum academic number that you have to achieve to be recruited.

And mid 600s is good enough if your pretty fast, there will be other guys in your recruiting class with much better scores, which will help average the academic number.

Hey copy and paste error: The first word of post should be "Every" not "very"

Thanks very much for all the info. I get my first SAT scores back tomorrow, according to the College Board site, so I guess I'll see how it goes. I appreciate all the insights.

By the way, for those of you who have run for an Ivy League school, how was your experience in general? Was it ok balancing athletics and academics?

I ran for Cornell back in the early 2000's while majoring in civil and environmental engineering. The academic workload was no joke, and being a varsity athlete made it very hard to balance sports, academics, and any semblence of a social life. That said, it was doable and myself and the vast majority of the other guys on my team managed to make it through in 4 years with reasonable (2.7-3.3) GPA's in mostly engineering/hard science majors. A few fell by the wayside and ended up either dropping off the team or transfering to easier schools. Another few managed to pull off truly impressive grades (3.7+) while competing.

Most from my graduating class went on to do pretty impressive things after college. At the high GPA end of the spectrum one teammate went to Harvard Law School, one went to Duke Law and then transfered to Stanford Law, and another joined McKinsey and then eventually ended up a Harvard Business School. One really smart teammate enrolled in an MD+PhD program at NYU. Most of us in fat part of the GPA bell curve didn't fair so bad either. Several of us B students became engineers and scientists, continued on to graduate school at very respectable graduate schools, or went on to top 20 law schools and top 20 business schools.

As to your original question: Yes, coaches recommendations can influence admissions decisions. That said there is not that much leeway granted to XC/Track programs. When I was at Cornell the average SAT of all admitted students was just under 1400 Math+Verbal while the team average was just over 1350 Math+Verbal. Everyone on the team had a 3.7+ HS GPA without exception. If your SATs average less than 650 per section then you better be pretty fast.

Back when I was in HS, I remember one of the best runners at the state level was trying to get into an Ivy. He had a SAT in the 1200's, and ran either a 1:52-1:53. Although he got denied by the Ivy, he still went to a great non-Ivy University.

MBB wrote:

I ran for Cornell back in the early 2000's while majoring in civil and environmental engineering. The academic workload was no joke, and being a varsity athlete made it very hard to balance sports, academics, and any semblence of a social life. That said, it was doable and myself and the vast majority of the other guys on my team managed to make it through in 4 years with reasonable (2.7-3.3) GPA's in mostly engineering/hard science majors. A few fell by the wayside and ended up either dropping off the team or transfering to easier schools. Another few managed to pull off truly impressive grades (3.7+) while competing.

I agree with MBB, as I had gone to Harvard and did engineering as well. The majority of the team though was not in any hard science (a lot of humanity majors on the team, due to interest and that humanity classes are not scheduled during practice time). However, if you had a class during practice time, the coaches should be understand enough to allow you practice at another time (either in the morning or early evening, but typically morning). It was not uncommon for people to bring their homework to meets and see them do it either in between events or on the bus.

At Ivies, if you have certain academic standards, the rest doesn't matter if the coach has you on the sheet he submits. I think those standards are something like 1400 SAT, and top 1/3 of your highschool class. If you have those, the school won't reject you. If you don't have those, the school still might accept you, I think one of our top runners scored below 1100.

As for grades during college, we always had a few people each semester who got 4.0s. One of our top runners was really struggling with grades (and running) the first year or two, but eventually figured it out and turned everything around. I'm nowhere near his level at running but was really proud to see him work so hard and figure things out.

You should discount any comments by anyone who claims that all of these schools have the same process, the same "cut-off" scores and class ranks, and so on. Different schools do things very differently, and the results of those different processes and standards are often very apparent when you compare academic achievements and aptitudes of athletes with those of the general student population at each school.

When I was an undergraduate at M.I.T. many years ago, the coaches had absolutely no influence on admissions decisions. Zero. When a new athletics director was hired from Princeton, he was surprised to discover that the athletics department at M.I.T. had absolutely no say in the admissions process, since things were very different in the Ivy League (and, from what I saw, apparently different from school to school within the Ivy League). I have read posts on letsrun that have indicated that M.I.T. coaches now have influence on admissions decisions, which I am inclined to believe is a bad thing. Even so, I would be very surprised if anyone with mid-600 SAT scores (math and verbal) would be admitted to M.I.T. or Cal Tech merely because he or she is an excellent athlete. I can't say the same about the Ivies, Stanford, or Duke.

The answer is most definitely YES.

Though it depends on the athlete, an ivy league coach can basically tell admissions to accept a kid who is under-qualified (though usually in no more than one way, e.g., lower GPA or lower SATs, not both). Happens all the time.

MIT is a Division III school.

A girl on our team (who I did not directly coach) got into Cornell with help from the track program (her Dad indicated he didn't think she would have been accepted otherwise). She was pretty good by Ivy standards; never an NCAA qualifier but won the Heps DT four times. Graduated in time, never in academic difficulty, works a good job in the field she studied.

Charlotte Hall wrote:

Though it depends on the athlete, an ivy league coach can basically tell admissions to accept a kid who is under-qualified (though usually in no more than one way, e.g., lower GPA or lower SATs, not both). Happens all the time.

I suppose a coach can "tell" an admissions office whatever he or she wants, but that doesn't mean that the admissions office will go along with the coach's desire.

And yes, I'm aware that M.I.T. is a Division III school. The original poster was asking about the practices at schools with very high admissions standards, not schools that hand out athletic scholarships.

Coaches have significant power in this process. I was a top HS runner applying to one of the top 5 schools in the nation with decent grades. I put together my app in 2 days and the admission office called less than 2 weeks later...almost one month before early decision applicants are notified of their acceptance. Working outside of normal policy like this would not be possible without the coach having influence.

Erik Olsen?

One of my teammates was applying to Cornell, and the coach basically told him he was in. Very fast, SAT in the 1400s and he got rejected, so I don't know just how much clout the coaches have at that school.