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Choosing Schools By Division is the wrong way to choose!
Many parents and high school athletes simply assume that if they cannot play D1, they can play D2, and if they cannot play D2, they can play D3.
After D1 football and D1 basketball, I would ask you to please not evaluate any programs simply by division. There are so many other factors that contribute to a team’s talent level, and unless you evaluate a variety factors, you will find a lot of parity amongst schools that compete at different divisions and you will find many differences between individual sports at a given school (meaning one school could have a very talented tennis team, but their swimming team might not be so good).
Without factoring in a school's individual success, strength of their league, geographic location, and the climate they play in, there is no way you can choose a school (or any school for that matter) simply by what division they are. The Making of a Student-Athlete discusses in great detail how to research and evaluate individual programs as they relate to you and your ability, but let’s look at 4 factors in more detail.
Individual Success – Some programs, regardless of division have built up a reputation and have a track record for being successful and because of this, these teams continue to attract talented recruits who individually want to compete at a high level. In 1989 Southern Maine University made their first appearance in the Division 3 World Series. Since then the team has made 5 more appearances and won twice (91 and 97). This success has put Southern Maine on the map for local New England baseball players who want to play and compete at a very high level and has led talented baseball players to the school year-after-year.
But if you want to talk success, then the conversation starts and ends with the Kenyon College (D3) swimming program. The Kenyon College men’s swimming team just wrapped up their 26th straight D3 NCAA swimming championship. The women are not far behind and just won their 20th NCAA championship in a row. For fun, I decided to compare some top times from the championship to some top times for Stanford University, a D1 swimming program. Kenyon’s Mark Brooks swam a 100-meter freestyle in a time of 44.23. The top time on Stanford for the 2003-2004 season (according to their web site) was 44.06. While Brooks was a shade under the best Stanford time, his time was faster than the fastest time posted by 10 other Stanford swimmers this year. His 200 individual medley time was 1:47.72, a second slower than the best Stanford time, but faster than 10 other Stanford swimmers. Elliot Rush, another Kenyon swimmer, swam the 500 freestyle in a time of 4:24:57, good enough to beat 14 of the best times turned in by Stanford swimmers this year.
The moral of the story? Unless you evaluate an individual team's success, you cannot simply assume that all D1 are better than all D3 teams. In this case, Kenyon College a D3 school, has some extremely talented swimmers on their team, who, had they chosen to, could have swam at a top D1 level. Why did they choose to go to a D3 school? Well, I have no idea, personal preference maybe? The question is not why are they there, but how does their presence affect your recruiting process? And the answer is, unless you are extremely talented, there are many D3 programs that you will not be able to play at and some D3 teams have D1 caliber players.
Strength of league – Most leagues have teams consisting of schools that play at a similar level. This isn’t an accident. While there always seems to be one dominant team in a league, by and large the level of competition should be roughly the same across the league. This is usually because the schools share several common traits that attract roughly the same type of athletes to the school. At Fairfield, we played in the MAAC which consisted of Fairfield, Iona, Manhattan, St. Peters, Lemoyne, Canisius, Sienna, and Niagra. Now, what do these schools have in common? They are all located in the Northeast, in close proximity to each other, most are Catholic and some are Jesuit, and they are all roughly the same size in terms of the number of students. While individual teams at certain schools are sometimes more successful, by and large, if you have the skills to play athletics at one of these schools, you probably have the ability to play at any of these schools. If that weren’t the case, then the league would not be very fair. Now, there are always exceptions and I will give you an example. Now that a few schools from the Big East are moving to the ACC, several teams are going to discover just how talented other teams are in certain sports.
Let's look at a few talented teams in the ACC. For basketball the conversation starts and ends with Duke and North Carolina which have teams that are routinely ranked near the top in the country. Baseball, well, last time I checked Clemson, Georgia Tech, and Florida State fielded some pretty good baseball teams, ditto for Golf as some of these schools attract the top college golfers in the country if not the world. Soccer, well North Carolina has probably the most famous women’s soccer program in the country. So what does all of this mean? Nothing if you are the University of Miami and are moving to the ACC, but for a team like Boston College, it could mean some culture shock for your athletic teams for a few years. Boston College will have trouble competing against teams in the ACC for many sports. That is not an insult, it’s just that many of these ACC schools attract a different type of athlete, due to their past success and location (i.e. warm weather) If you are a top golfer or baseball player do you want to go to Boston College where your season is played in March and April and it is usually struggling to break 40 degrees out and the field is cold, hard, and wet? Or do you want to go to Clemson where it is sunny and 70 in the spring. Having tried out for a college team in Orlando and played in snow flurries in games in Connecticut, do I need to point out which climate is more suitable for baseball?
Geographic location – Some states simply have more participation in one sport over another, which contributes to the success of individual teams within that state and the state of Ohio is an excellent example for football. Mount Union College, a small D3 school in Ohio in the fall of 2003 had victories of 58-0 and 66-0, had won 46 straight games and 100 of its last 101 games at one point. That my friends is a D3 powerhouse, and they have many players that could compete at the D1 and D2 level, but chose not to. Ohio is a hotbed for high school football and there is another strong D3 team called Ohio Northern. Ohio Northern has 100 players listed on its roster and only 4 are from outside of Ohio. This is a good example of a coach not having to do a lot of outside recruiting because there is so much talent in his own state. If you wanted to play football for Ohio Northern or Mount Union and lived in say, New Hampshire, you'd better have some compelling information and skills for the coach to recruit you. The Ohio State men’s hockey team (a D1 program) on the other hand shows us another perspective. In 2003 the hockey roster listed ZERO players from Ohio, and Ohio is obviously not known for their youth hockey programs. It’s no secret either that Florida is filled with many talented high school baseball players, and the majority of the baseball programs in Florida (regardless of division) are very competitive. The next section will illustrate this point.
Climate – Is it any surprise that baseball teams in Florida compete at a high level? Not only is baseball the most popular youth sport in Florida, but the players get to play and practice 365 days out of the year if they want to. So not only are there a high number of baseball players in the State, but talented baseball players. Due to Florida’s size, the number of talented baseball teams, and Florida’s tuition reciprocity program at state schools for academic achievers, there is little incentive for local players to leave the state to play. Sure, we have all heard of the success of the Miami Hurricanes baseball program, but smaller schools like Rollins College (D2), Florida Southern (2), or Nova Southeastern (D3), attract extremely talented players as well; while many of these teams are “D2” or “D3”, realistically, you have to be a top D1 caliber player to attend these schools. The lure of playing baseball in Florida for many recruits from other states is a powerful one. Unfortunately, many players coming from colder climates do not understand the talent needed to play college baseball in Florida. Other states have similar patterns. In the New England area, hockey is king and the majority of schools that have competitive hockey programs can put their rosters together with local players from the 100 plus private schools that attract top hockey players from around the country. Ditto for Minnesota and hockey, the majority of schools that compete in hockey in Minnesota have no problem finding local players or players just over the border in Canada. California is another state with nice weather and a high participation in athletics. California also has a huge state school system and many coaches at all levels do not have to recruit far from their state, and since their scholarship dollars stretch further with in-state players, there is little incentive to leave the state to recruit if they can find the talent locally.
Obviously there are many factors to evaluate when trying to select individual colleges that might be a good fit for you. This is why simply choosing schools by division does not work. It is also one of the reasons why sending mass marketing emails or letters to college coaches does not work either. If you are having trouble trying to figure out the individual talents of a particular team, ask the coach and they may be able to explain the level they play at in more detail.
For more information on how to evaluate different programs as they relate to your skills, we recommend you order The Making of a Student-Athlete
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