Recruiting plan for high academic D3

@NotABaseballGuy, that is an excellent post! The benefits of attending, and playing baseball at, a HA D3 can be tremendous. And you have summed them up very well. IMO it’s a route that more should pursue. The best HA D3 options provide a much more player friendly experience and turn out more well rounded young men that are well equipped for life. The mentoring that you mentioned is something that is promoted in these programs. It doesn’t happen organically. It’s something to value highly because today’s kids need it now more than ever before. I have seen this route pay off handsomely for a family that I am very close to.

Yes, excellent post with some very astute thoughts and observations.

While most of the college athletic world has radically changed, there remains one D1 league which provides the same.

Starts with an I?

Hello, folks, it's been a while!@NotABaseballGuy great insights -- and congrats to your son.

Years before I became a parent I read an article about a growing theory that adolescents' development was due as much or more to the influence of their peers than that of their parents and teachers.  It varies with different kids, but I think think this is largely true, and it continues into college years.  I have have strong reason to believe that the positive influence of upperclassmen greatly affected my son's academic success, his career choices, and  how he's gone about his business professionally.  I also believe that he did his best to do the same for underclassmen when his time came.

Totally agree.  I think baseball son likely needed baseball to motivate him to attend college at all, let alone come away with a masters degree and, more importantly, now possess the work ethic to succeed in other life stuff.  Not D3 but some of the same principals apply.

And from players I have coached, I have had plenty of feedback that verifies this "beyond baseball" well-rounded bond and networking is particularly strong in HA D3 and similarly classified schools.

So this is a question loosely related to the topic.

What does a kid need to score on SAT/ACT to be considered a candidate for a HA D3 school? Also what GPA and rigor are they looking for? A certain amount of honors/AP etc?

What about extra activities like clubs? Community service?  Music? Does playing more than one sport help? National honor society?

Totally depends on the HA D3. There's a lot of variety within that category. You might want to read the entirety of this thread. I mention above that my son applied to his current school without submitting his SAT score. That's easier to do from an independent school perhaps, than from a public school. I don't know. As a general rule, liberal arts colleges are more likely to be test optional than larger universities like NYU or U Chicago.

You might want to check out the "Your College Bound Kid" podcast if you are new to the college admissions scene.

@BB328 posted:

So this is a question loosely related to the topic.

What does a kid need to score on SAT/ACT to be considered a candidate for a HA D3 school? Also what GPA and rigor are they looking for? A certain amount of honors/AP etc?

What about extra activities like clubs? Community service?  Music? Does playing more than one sport help? National honor society?

**Edited for accuracy.

I can tell you our experience. 2025 had very few extracurriculars except National honor society, national merit finalist, volunteer work, 3.86/4.25, 1480 SAT. 9 AP's. high rigor top 100HS . Because of injury, he really had limited exposure until fall 2024. He got a couple NESCAC offers for supported admission and a few other 2nd and 3rd tier D3s.  If he mass blasted applications into a bunch of schools, he probably could have gotten into some of them and just showed up in the fall and  then been rostered. But he wanted to go somewhere where the coaches would be excited to have him. He ended up committing to what I consider a 3rd tier HA D3 but got some good merit money with a coach he really likes and promises for opportunities as a freshman. He's happy so I'm happy. I used to be hung up about the prestige of a school but I've mellowed with time and experience.

HA D3 admissions are complex and can't really be summarized easily. Schools like MIT, Cal tech, Univ Chicago are almost a crap shoot unless your kid is also a superstar student. 1520+ SAT. 3.95 uwGPA. numerous high level ECs. The next level down like Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona, Harvey Mudd, JHU, etc will require SAT's around 1480-1500+; 3.9 uwgpa; all depending on how good your kid is at baseball. If high skills then less ECs needed. No merit money here.  The next level down is much easier and now we get into some merit money. My kid was getting offers of around 20-35k/year with his credentials. High dollar recruiting services are probably unnecessary. My kid is going to a school that he just emailed and sent video. He then visited the school and met with staff and players. They never saw him pitch live. The school is in a competitive conference but the program is rebuilding after COVID. This is just our experience and my opinions.

^^^ This, what dadbelly23 says.  Find the sweet spot between low acceptance rate and lots of financial aid, and higher acceptance rate and lots of merit money.

In dadbelly's first two categories, they will want lots of AP classes and no Cs.  They assume your extra-curricular is baseball, so if have excelled therenand you have coach's support, you won't need much else in the way of ECs.  Although it doesn't hurt to do some, because what if you are injured at some point?

Even if some schools are test optional, if your son tests well, have him take the tests; it will look good if he does well.  Remember that half of the test dates are during baseball/travel season, so try to get in some tests in the fall.

@anotherparent posted:

^^^ This, what dadbelly23 says.  Find the sweet spot between low acceptance rate and lots of financial aid, and higher acceptance rate and lots of merit money.

Great point. The elements of financial and merit aid make D3 recruiting challenging. Unfortunately we don't qualify for financial aid but I'm not affluent enough to not care about an extra $100-150k in college costs. So going to a NESCAC would mean full cost $90+k per year vs say 68k for a "lesser" school. If someone actually qualifies for fin aid then it completely changes the decision making variables.

Excellent posts here parsing out the "high academic" D3 process.  Going into the recruiting grinder with my three guys, I asked folks on this site a bazillion questions and the answers I got varied but almost all were spot on. I'll explain below but first, please forgive this verbal flight of fancy; I'm on a literal flight, 3400 miles from home, 32000 feet up, bouncing around like a ping pong ball at an old folks' bingo hour; I'm certain the pilot is a turbulence-seeking missile, and a successful one at that, duty-bound to hit every single pocket of unsettled air currently in existence across the skies of America. I haven't been around HSBBW buddies enough lately, and these words, so many words, are just itching to get out.

This little piece by William Carlos Williams, a poet from a hundred years ago, comes to mind:

What I mean is so much depends on an individual kid's essential kid-ness, and how his kid-ness differs from another's kid-ness. All wheelbarrows are not the same, though a lot of the same stuff depends on them, garden to garden. All rain is not the same and God knows all white chickens are not the same. Just look at the different colors of their eggs.

Anyway, my kids are not alike, other than they're male, like baseball, and have the same mother, and also, I think, father.

The test scores mentioned above are a  good guide.  Kids graduating around 2022 or so had the "advantage" of  standardized testing not being required at almost any school.  Kids where I live couldn't get ANY test dates in 2020- 2021, so AP courses (including, for the first time, the scores kids got on their AP exams), began to matter at some schools. So, what happened to my third boy was the school he ended up at wasn't satisfied with his academic rigor. He took the appropriate number of AP courses, but not the RIGHT ones.  He had three years of a language which helped (though these schools REALLY like four years).  Coach finally said he could offer support but only if son took an Additional AP course in the SPRING of his senior year, AFTER he was theoretically admitted during the early decision process. They wanted to see an official document that showed that extra AP course on his spring schedule. So, we caved, and he took a one-semester AP psych course that he, at first, wasn't interested in at all.  Eventually, he liked it, and I, after my own initial annoyance, appreciated the opportunity they gave him to prove how much he wanted to be there.   Now it's one of his double major subjects. Go figure.

So, like baseball, where so often something happens on the field that no one can remember seeing before, baseball recruiting has little wrinkles that show up suddenly and uniquely. May not happen to another kid.

Two last thoughts:  I zealously followed the mantra of helping my kids use their academics and athletics skills combined to get into the most rigorous colleges that would have them.  That was the right move for two of the three.  But Dadbelly's story could have been and maybe should have been the experience for one of mine. I'm still not sure his HA school was the best FIT, and fit matters, high academic ambitions or no. Neglect fit at your son's peril.

Finally, if you weren't a fan of the poem above, maybe you'll like this Williams short story.  It's short and has some violence in it just to keep you interested. 

Williams, "The Use of Force"

(Having your kid recruited feels like this, sometimes.)

@Dadbelly2023 posted:

Great point. The elements of financial and merit aid make D3 recruiting challenging. Unfortunately we don't qualify for financial aid but I'm not affluent enough to not care about an extra $100-150k in college costs. So going to a NESCAC would mean full cost $90+k per year vs say 68k for a "lesser" school. If someone actually qualifies for fin aid then it completely changes the decision making variables.

Painful topic for us. Financial aid info could be its own thread. I had thought schools would handle this is in similar ways, but in our experience each school had unique formulas that affected our costs.

The short answer to how much college costs: How much ya got?

So good Smoke... And funny. I remember your advice helping me out so much a few years ago. Thx again.

@Dadbelly2023 posted:

Great point. The elements of financial and merit aid make D3 recruiting challenging. Unfortunately we don't qualify for financial aid but I'm not affluent enough to not care about an extra $100-150k in college costs. So going to a NESCAC would mean full cost $90+k per year vs say 68k for a "lesser" school. If someone actually qualifies for fin aid then it completely changes the decision making variables.

Just so people know, here's how the schools with a LOT of financial aid have been doing things:  they calculate how much they think you can pay, and then they give you the rest.   They give up to 50% if you have 2 kids in college at the same time.

this reminds me of the joke about Income Tax:

IRS: You have to pay your taxes by April 15.

Taxpayer: OK. How much do I owe?

IRS:  You have to figure that out