There is a wide range of committed athletes this year at Ida B. Wells High School (IBW), spread out over various sports. “Committing” is when an athlete legally promises to attend that college or university and be a member of their sports team. Rather than the traditional route of applying and waiting to hear about acceptance, students generally have to wait to receive offers from the college. There are different levels, or divisions, that athletes can play in, some of the most commonly known are D1, D2, D3 and NAIA.
According to ScholarshipStats.com, despite a large number of available schools, only around 7% of high school student athletes play a varsity sport in college, and under 2% play at D1 schools. At IBW, just 5% of student athletes will go on to play their sport in college. “I think it’s very exhausting,” Winston Rivas, a college coordinator at IBW said about being a student athlete. “[But] it’s really important to maintain balance.”
“I think the biggest thing you can do is just work hard,” said Pierce Myers, an IBW senior committed to Chapman University for Track and Field. “Be annoying to coaches. Keep sending them emails, make sure they know who you are, get your name out there.”
Zoe Mish, an IBW senior and Hawaii Pacific University recruit grew to love volleyball from an early age after starting in first grade with her older sister. Mish always knew she wanted to keep playing and made the decision to work for recruitment in 8th grade. This process started with recording videos of her plays, working out, and making recruiting profiles. “I would send about 50 emails a day to a span of D3, D2, D1, any schools because at that point I was a freshman and didn’t know what school I wanted to go to yet or what I was looking for,” she said. At travel tournaments, Mish would reach out to coaches and tell them to come watch.
The summer between sophomore and junior year, Mish received camp invites from colleges and ended up attending eight different camps across the US, “I was all the way from California to South Carolina to North Carolina to Baltimore to Florida to Texas,” Mish said. Through this, she got to know where she would fit best and started aiming to go D2 because she thought it would be a good balance of school and sports.
Freshman year before Covid hit, Mish went on a trip with the IBW volleyball team to Hawaii and loved it.
It was after this trip, during sophomore year that she determined Hawaii Pacific was her dream school. “I think I emailed the school I was going to honestly like 300 times,” Mish recalls. In late June of her junior year, 2023, they called and offered her a spot, which she immediately accepted.
Despite each athlete’s individual experiences, both Mish and Myers emphasize persistence in communicating with coaches and the importance of making yourself known. With so many athletes across the country, it’s easy to get overlooked by coaches.
“You need to have confidence in yourself and believe in yourself,” said Mish. “You need to have something in you that makes you want to do it.”
