Day: July 4, 2014

College Q&A Recruiting

Question of the Day

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My coach mentioned that the NCAA recently changed its rules about when you could contact college coaches from after your junior year to after your sophomore year. Do you know anything about this? All I could find was about basketball. Anyways, any information would be great. Thanks!

The NCAA did change their rules but on the men’s side, the IRA coaches voted to stick with the original rules that said no calls before July 1st of your senior year. You can read about that here. As far as what the women’s side is doing, I’m going to assume that they’re following the new rules since I haven’t seen anything that says otherwise. The men opted out because they’re not part of the NCAA even though the IRA has adopted and follows the majority of their rules.

Also, just to clarify from what you said, it’s when they can contact you, not the other way around.

Here’s what the proposal says. This was taken from the NCAA’s PowerPoint since it’s more concise but if you want to read it in full legalese click here and scroll down to page 18, towards the bottom of the page where it says “No. 2013-26 RECRUITING”.

From what I can gather, for you guys it means you’ll probably need to decide earlier than usual whether or not you want to pursue rowing in college, in addition to having an idea of where you want to go.

For the most part though I can’t imagine that that many programs are going to drastically change how they do things. Smaller programs might try to go after potential recruits a little earlier to try and get ahead of the game but that’s about it. The fall is most likely still gonna be about getting early-decision seniors to sign their NLIs during the early-signing period but where things might start to change going forward is in the spring. If you show a lot of potential as a junior then you might get a call whereas you otherwise wouldn’t have gotten one for a few more months but for the majority of people things will probably stay the same as they are now.

College Q&A Recruiting Teammates & Coaches

Question of the Day

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How involved should my coach be in the recruiting process? I know it sounds bad but I haven’t really talked to him at all about this.

Eh, I think they should be as involved as you want them to be. In theory they’d at least know that you’re looking to row in college since a lot of the initial recruiting questionnaires will ask for their contact info. It’s also helpful to have them know what your plans are so that they aren’t totally blindsided if/when you ask them to write you a letter of recommendation.

Related: Letters of Recommendation

If you have a good relationship with your coach then involving them in the process can only help you, especially if they’ve been coaching for awhile or happen to know people in the rowing community. I was pretty close with my two coaches in high school and they were both really helpful when I was looking at colleges. Both knew all the coaches at the schools I was applying to, which was a huge help because they were able to tell me a bit about them before I actually met them, in addition to talking to them on my behalf.

Related: So I’ve noticed that most recruiting questionnaires ask for your coach’s phone/email. What do college coaches who are talking to your high school coach ask about? I’m not nervous about it cause my coach and I have always had a good relationship, I was just curious.

If you don’t have a close relationship with your coach or there’s been a lot of turnover to the point where you haven’t consistently had the same coach for at least two years then I wouldn’t worry about involving them beyond saying “hey, so I’m looking at these schools and was asked to include your contact info on the recruiting forms I filled out”.