How do you link Admissions to Softball Coach?

[girliesmom]

I disagree. DD received 100's of emails and letters from colleges. Out of curiosity, I had her email a coach at a very high academic school and say, I received this in the mail and looked at your program and am interested. She did link to a skills video and profile. She received an email back that day from the coach inviting her to a camp which she will attend in Nov.

That's awesome InsidePitch! That's good info to know. Thanks!

 

[girliesmom]

My DD is verballed to a high academic D3 school in the northeast. I agree with InsidePitch- my sense from my DD having looked at several of these schools and attended camps- is that they have two concerns- the first and foremost one is- can this student even be admitted to my school- i.e. do they have the class load, grades and test scores to be competitive. The fact that your DD received an admission flyer from the school independent of the coach suggests that the school thinks your DD is a competitive candidate- this is important information for the coaches. This is may not be true for many D3 schools but for the high academic ones it is. My DDs emails ALWAYS included GPA, ACT and SAT scores so they knew my DD was a competitive candidate - and they then would consider her softball skills. Several of these coaches have little to no wiggle room with admissions so they look for this information up front. This is not necessarily true for the Ivies where they can accept candidates with GPA and SATs a bit lower than average if the athletic package is very attractive.

PS the coaches recommended taking SAT and ACT in spring sophomore year or fall junior year; so you can get on their radar ASAP for the schools you are interested in

Thank you MandM. DD has written about 20 letters to coaches in the last 10 days and so far, she's gotten 7 responses back. 4 were standard "canned" emails asking for her to fill out the questionnaire. She did however get 3 personal emails back from 3 different coaches (we've found that D3 tend to be more personal but the D1s were canned responses due to NCAA recruiting rules of not being able to freely communicate with the prospect). It's nice not to get a "canned" message. In her emails, she discusses her achievements athletically and academically and explains why she wants to attend X college. She also includes a link to her skills video. Since her response rate hasn't been as good as she would have liked (not that we know what the response rate should be for such letters), we thought that maybe mentioning getting an email from Admissions might be a good way of garnering interest from coaches who may not necessarily respond? Thanks for your insight. It's very helpful.