It can’t be stressed enough that most specialists sit beyond the bottom of a college coach’s to-do list. Even on teams that need a kicker desperately, you are typically the last position recruited (and first blamed for mishaps but that’s for another day)
No coach ever said “man, we can’t recruit him, their grades are too good” For better or for worse the higher your GPA/SAT/ACT scores are, and the more challenging your HS course load the better.
If you have about a 3.0 GPA you will be recruitable to nearly every state school in the country and average private college. But, if you have your eyes set on the Ivies, Patriots, NESCACs, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Dukes of the world, keep reading please…
https://twitter.com/brendancahill_/status/1618761388255768578?s=20&t=M_WhHaiPEgtQzRdPPQoltQ
Always fun getting Kicking Twitter riled up with a reminder that grades count.
This is a great link explaining the band system for prospective fencing recruits (hey we’re all specialists in a way no?) with some good graphs just explaining its concept.
The Band System as a Bell Curve, basically.
Ivy and Ivy-like colleges rank or “slot” their PSA’s by admissibility relative to their on field ability. Whether formally or informally, every college does this. But, the Ivies are probably the most formalized about it.
The Ivies have 4 Bands you can fall into as a PSA. Let’s say the ideal score to get into Yale is a 4.0 GPA, this is theoretically what you’d need to do by-band to get admitted as a recruited student-athlete:
Ivies will get the most Band 1 and Band 2 slots which is where most specialists need to be recruited.
Bands 3 and 4 are reserved for program-changing talented QBs, WRs and…well basically anything other than a kicker.
Bands also don’t stay still. The band range scores will change year to year. And, programs can also save their bands from one recruiting class to another. For example, Princeton has 10 Band 3 spots from last year, it only used 7 of them, now they have 3 extra Band 3’s for next year.
We’re getting a little too deep into the Band System minutia here. The principle is that the better your grades are the easier all recruiting will be for you.
As a former teacher at a high powered charter school I want to vomit every time I hear the word “rigorous” but, there is something to be said for having a challenging course load.
A 4.0 GPA with 3 sections of lunch and 2 study halls probably won’t make Yale or even UCONN very interested in you. It is possible to have a lower GPA say, a 3.4 GPA but with an incredibly difficult course load, that will look better than a 3.9 GPA of unchallenging courses.
It’s also helpful sometime to know what your unweighted GPA is (you can watch the MIT and Dartmouth coaches duke this one out on Twitter here on the right)
“You always feel better when a kid has got an SAT or ACT score that we can clearly put a number on. Sure, we are test-optional, but it can take longer to evaluate a kid if we need to just look at their transcript with no score versus just having a score we’d like to see anyway.” - Former College Coach
https://twitter.com/CoachGazlay/status/1617580767701528576?s=20&t=M_WhHaiPEgtQzRdPPQoltQ
MIT coach on Twitter laying it out for me.
In theory, yes, every school is now test-optional, but in actuality, it’s going to be faster for you to have the score these schools want to see.
It is going to take more brain power to recruit you, bring your transcript to the admissions department and see what they say about how your GPA alone stacks up to what they want versus being able to say “yep, he’s got a 1370 SAT he’s good”
In a position where no one wants to recruit you, keeping your recruiting as brain-dead-as-easy-as-possible is crucial.
I say take the SAT/ACT whichever you like better, and if you have a poor score, you don’t have to submit it.
If you are in-state you usually just need a heart beat to get into a place like UNC Chapel Hill which is a state public college. However, if you are out of state, you will need near Ivy League Level grades that we discussed earlier.
If you are going to get an offer as a PWO without scholarship money to a big state school that you are an out of state student at, you will still need to hit their out of state academic requirements which can be much higher than their in-state ones.
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Chapter 2: Stars, Rankings and Exposure Camps
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Chapter 4: Your Recruiting Timeline, from Start to Finish
Before Recruiting in Ivy League, Applying Some Math (Published 2011)