Recruiting in NESCAC, an updated look

By Benet Pols

Union College, one of the founding members of NESCAC, has won the 2014 NCAA DI men's ice hockey championship. As we wrote a couple of weeks ago, Union left the conference back in 1977 after its ambitions for a DI program rocked the campus and eventually cost its coach and president their jobs.

In the wake if Union's success and our brief view what recruitment was like back in the 1970's it is a good time to look into how current recruiting practices at NESCAC colleges have evolved both from an academic standpoint and an athletic standpoint.

Fortunately for the staff here at HockeyInTheCac, the hard work has been done for us by the Bowdoin Orient in a recent three part series on athletics at Bowdoin. The first part, Banded Together, gives an excellent overview of recruitment practices and policies across the conference and across all sports.

Posters on the USCHO online forums frequently denigrate the conference's stringent recruiting standards and point out that success like that had by Middlebury on the 1990's and 2000's is unlikely to be repeated.

In reading the Bowdoin Orient's Sam Weyrauch's excellent three part series on athletics at Bowdoin, we have to wonder if the forum gripers may not be right?  Weyrauch's first piece, Banded Together, certainly points out a homogenization across the conference that suggests it is unlikely that one school will ever be able to collect enough "B Band" students to dominate the way Middlebury once did.

Below are links to the three stories.

"Banded Together: recruited athletes with sub-average academics can receive preference in admissions."


"A Path to Campus: looking at the weight of recruitment visits and 'early reads.'"


After the Acceptance: walk-ons and GPAs.