The College Soccer Guy breaks down pre-reads in recruiting: admissions says you're academically qualified, but the coach still picks who gets in. He walks through a real scenario where a student loves one school but others are pushing for an answer first.
What does a pre-read have to do with college soccer? Let me tell you. I'm The College Soccer Guy. I help you play college soccer. Let's get into it. So one of my students just received the following message: your pre-read came back positive. I'm still deciding which players to support through admissions. So what does that mean? Oh my gosh. So this is a really good school, academically top Division III school for this student. And basically what they're saying is our school is so competitive that in order to get a positive pre-read, it basically means we sent in your information to our admissions and they said, look, this student is acceptable to come to our school, but there's a lot of people that are acceptable, meaning good enough to go to X school. So the coach is going to decide which person he's going to give his magic finger to or the magic star to. So when all those players apply to this particular school, this coach will go, well, guess what, this one's a soccer player. and then admissions will go, "Hey everybody, everybody, that's a soccer player," and then they'll slide that one in, and that player will get to go to that school because of their academics, who were still very good that the admissions process liked them, but it was also better than maybe a student who didn't play soccer, so then that kid got to go in. This is why soccer can be a huge part of getting into a school, and also why academics can be a huge part of getting into a school. Now this particular student has 2 other offers who are gonna want an answer probably before this coach has decided, which is an issue because this school happens to be this student's favorite choice of the 3 schools. But he may not have the opportunity to wait for this school to make a decision because then he'll lose his other decision. So we're going to be in a little predicament. I'll give you an update soon. If you want more help playing college soccer and you're in a similar situation or you want to be in a similar situation, give me a call. Links in the bio.
