Exploring the athlete recruitment process

Rob Dauster Guest Writer

Currently ranked as the 11th best liberal arts college in the country by U.S. News and World Report, Vassar has always been an institution renowned for its academics. With a high standard of academic excellence, a small enrollment and a relatively large number of applicants, admission is very selective; only 24 percent of applicants to Vassar are admitted.

While the competitiveness of the application process fosters continual improvement in the academic quality of its applicants, it has shown to be less helpful for the athletics program. The pool of athletes talented enough to play a sport at the college level is fairly small, and this number further shrinks when academics are considered as well.

Women’s Basketball Head Coach Angel Mason has seen both sides of the recruiting process. She is a 2004 graduate of Butler University, where she played Division I basketball for four years. Mason said that at schools such as Vassar, athletic ability takes a back seat during the recruiting process.

“At Vassar, you have to recruit the student first, then look at ability and hope they’re a good enough athlete or that you can make them a good enough athlete,” Mason said. “At Division I schools, you recruit athletes and make them students.”
Many of the schools against which Vassar competes in athletics (and often in academics, too) have slots for athletes. This means that every year, each coach gets a certain number of recruits that will automatically be accepted into the school, even if the applicant’s academics would not generally meet the high standards of admittance. Amherst, Williams and Skidmore Colleges all have slots. Vassar does not.

Athletics are not completely ignored by the Admissions Committee, however.

“Athletic talent alone will not earn a student admission to Vassar,” said Senior Associate Director of Admissions J.C. Tesone in an e-mailed statement. ”They need to meet the same academic standards as any other candidate. However, special abilities in athletics (or in other areas such as music, art, dance, etc.) can give an academically qualified candidate an edge versus the competition.” Coaches can recommend students for admission based on their athletic talent, Tesone said. This is true for students with musical and artistic skill as well.

Though this process puts Vassar at a bit of an athletic disadvantage, many coaches would not change this rule. Head Coach of the Men and Women’s Volleyball Teams Jonathon Penn said that it may actually benefit his teams in the long run. He said that the academic standards mean that the kids that end up playing for him are great people and do everything as a student first.

“While it would make recruiting easier, changing the rule wouldn’t necessarily help the program,” said Penn. “With how hard this school is academically, you need great kids that care about school as well as sports. It helps create a team.”

Head Coach of Men’s Basketball Mike Dutton said that he does not get jealousabout the recruitment process of other schools, and instead focuses on doing the best he can with the given circumstances. “I think it’s up to each school to determine how they see athletics and how it takes importance in their community,” he said. “It’s not something I worry about here.”

However, Dutton also mentioned that the recruiting process is much cheaper when coaches get slots, saving the Athletics Department and the school money. When you can slot players, you can guarantee that they will be accepted to the school, which means that once you get the players to fill the slots, you no longer have to spend as much time and money scouting and recruiting.

Without the slots, coaches must broaden their recruitment—not only do they need to get more recruits to apply to the school, but they need to find the players with both the academic qualifications to get into Vassar and the ability and desire to compete in collegiate athletics. Mason said that she normally has contact with 100-120 prospective students a year about playing basketball at Vassar.

Assistant men’s lacrosse coach Mike Chin said that the number is upward of 400-500 for his team. It costs money not only to identify such students, but also to convince them that Vassar is the right school.

Convincing an athlete to come to Vassar is a lot harder than it seems. Despite recent successful seasons by many teams, Vassar is still not considered a school with a strong athletics tradition similar to those of Amherst, Williams or Hamilton College. The College has recently put a lot of money into the athletics program ,with new gyms for the basketball and volleyball teams, beautiful new fields for the outdoor sports and a varsity athlete weight room. The College also joined the Liberty League, one of the best Division III conferences in New York.

Competing for recruits with more established programs is just part of the problem that Vassar coaches face. Assistant men’s basketball coach Jamie Snyder-Fair said that the “liberal, hippie, artsy” stereotypes tend to scare some recruits away, especially those from more conservative backgrounds. And that doesn’t even take into account the stigma associated with formerly being an all-women’s college, although that is a much bigger issue when recruiting male athletes.

Recruiting for lacrosse should, in theory, be easy for a school like Vassar. Lacrosse is a very expensive sport, with a good stick and set of pads costing upward of $800. As a result, it has become a white-collar sport, with the boarding schools in Northeast playing the highest level of lacrosse. Many of those athletes come from families that can then afford to pay for a school as expensive as Vassar.

Lacrosse is also mainly played in upstate New York, Long Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and Maryland—all places that are easily accessible by car from Poughkeepsie. Chin, who in just his third year of coaching has already built a reputation as a great recruiter, still has trouble getting some of the athletes he is recruiting to look past Vassar’s stereotypes.

What makes it so difficult is the nature of the school. As Chin put it, “The liberal political mentality, the open-mindedness and the ‘weird factor.’” Because of Vassar’s liberalism, it is a school that tends to attract very unique individuals who feel free to express themselves and be themselves, from their style of dress to their art to their political views.

That’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s what makes Vassar the school and the environment that it is. But, as Chin explained, there are a lot of 17-year-olds out there that see that “weirdness”, that uniqueness, and will get scared off by it.

Regardless of the reason, there will always be recruits that cannot handle the Vassar environment. It is just another factor that Vassar coaches will have to work around when recruiting players. But as Vassar’s athletics continue to improve and excel, there is hope that the recruiting process will become easier for coaches and that they will continue to attract applicants whose academic and athletic abilities are top-tiered.