College Commitments Early?

I am going to stay anonymous but I am a senior right now (class of 2020) and I did not begin to reach out to schools until late april-late may and had absolutely no issues receiving responses. The money also did not dry up. The problem arises when you wait until September or August to initiate contact.

For reference, I will be competing D1 at a Power 5 school. My times are around 4:10, 9:10, 1:55.

Good luck.

We were in a similar boat although with a girl. Whatever the case, we emphasized academics and told our daughter that we would try to make it work, with or without athletics in the picture. We visited four schools during winter and spring of the junior year on our own. Contact was made with the coaches beforehand in each case. All made time to meet with us.

One school was dropped, based on the visit. One school emerged as her clear favorite - probably because of the coach’s enthusiasm and his emphasis on academics. All three schools continued recruiting her, offering official visits in the fall of her senior year. The first official visit was to her favorite school in September. She returned from that with a generous scholarship offer and accepted it immediately. She declined visits to the other schools which had not been fully arranged yet.

This may not be the usual route, but it saved a lot of uncertainty for her. She made sure she was on the radar of schools she liked and she ended up not having to monkey around too much during the cross country season in her senior year.

I’d aim to identify schools and programs of interest early this winter, then fill out the online forms and email coaches later in the winter or early in the spring. Coaches are pretty good about projecting for possible improvement so assuming your son’s sophomore times were in range you’re not going to annoy any coaches (they’ll just ignore you for now if they aren’t interested). For example, a mid-d boy in the 1:57ish, 4:20ish range isn’t going to annoy anyone; 2:02, 4:30 and you’re wasting your time for now.

Just have your son let the coaches know his times, grades, test scores, and that he’s interested in learning more about the program and the recruiting process. Maybe he only hears back from a few, but those discussions will be good practice and also might give him some target times for some of the programs. Then when he has track times next spring he can update the online forms and send emails updating coaches. He can wait until May, sure, but it’s probably a little easier to get started a bit earlier. It’ll also make things easier for you because he might start figuring out priorities early and you might want to take some unofficial visits in the spring or summer to check out campuses. July is when things start to move faster with invites for official visits. It’s tough for kids to make decisions at that point if they’ve just started.

Prepare your son to get ignored by some and for some coaches to ghost him for awhile then call out of the blue and get him excited. None of it is as systematic or straightforward as you’d think. Coaches are pretty busy and they all operate differently so don’t take it personally and don’t be afraid to be persistent. Also, a lot of kids don’t commit until much later in the winter of senior year so don’t fret too much if things aren’t falling into place by September. It’s nice to get it out of the way early but doesn’t always happen.

Thank you so much for these detailed and thoughtful responses. I think based on this advice he will do some outreach to some realistic target schools and maybe do a few unofficial visits/campus tours through winter, then reassess once he starts posting some track times as far as a broader effort. He (and we) are intrigued by the idea of wrapping this up early fall if possible.

Thank you.

I graduated in 2011, I doubt things have changed THAT much in 8 or 9 years... I committed in December of my senior year, and it seemed in college that's when other people would often commit is in the late fall or early winter of their senior year.

By track season of senior year college teams have all of their limited scholarship money wrapped up already, and only when they find out of last-minute transfers from their current roster will any money open up.

You very well could commit early, September seems fine. So I guess I'll summarize and say September-January during senior year is the most common time to commit, but the September-November is probably preferable to make sure the school hasn't thrown out too many pending offers.