Aside from academics, Seattle Prep prides themselves on their diverse athletic department, which offers fourteen different sports across three separate seasons. Over the past 2 years, dozens of Prep students have committed to playing sports at colleges across the country, ranging from Stanford all the way to Johns Hopkins. All these athletes went through something called the recruiting process, a mixture of interviews, visits, and so much more.
For Audrey Cromett, a senior on the girls’ varsity soccer team, there was so much more. “It was a lot of emails for the past three years. I’ve gone to three or four big travel tournaments every year in Florida, California, Arizona, Texas, all these big states where you have upwards of 500 scouts from different schools coming to watch kids. And then you just send a ton of emails to the schools that you’re interested in beforehand, and you hope that they show up.”
Cromett is committed to play college soccer at Tufts University, a Division III school in Massachusetts. To her, the recruiting process was more than just finding the best team, but instead a great mixture of academics and sports. She points out that when she “started looking at Tufts, it is a bigger school, it’s right in the middle of Boston, it has all the aspects of this big university. It’s just a different division of sport, but it’s all the same in other aspects of your school and your academics.”
Many other people are realizing that finding the best fit for them as a student athlete is important. In a study by NW Missouri St University, they found that the average GPA of a college student-athlete was 0.16 higher to that of a non-athlete – 3.56 compared to 3.4.
In relation to finding the right college, Cromett also said to “cast a broad net and be really open-minded about all the different schools that you’re looking at or could potentially look at because you know as a freshmen you might think one thing or you want a certain thing, but when you’re a senior or junior and you’re looking at the other schools you could want something completely different. And you might know people who are committing early on, and I would just say to remember that each process is your own and it’s going to be different. And it’s going to be unique for everybody.”
Over the past few years though the recruiting process has gone through a drastic overhaul. NIL deals, an enlarged transfer portal, and more and more people watching college athletics has made every commitment all the more difficult. But even with all of the hectic recruiting adjustments, Cromett still believes everyone can find their right college. “In the end, you’re going to end up at the right place for you. It’s your road. You can see all these other things happening, but the path forward for you is just going to be the best path.”
