“You certainly aren’t going to fill out a championship roster by doing the 1940’s, 1950’s thing where you just put up a notice in the school and watch who shows up for your team meeting,” says U of T coach Byron MacDonald.
Head of the Varsity Blues swim program, MacDonald boasts a successful track record as a recruiter, getting such superstars as Olympic swimmers Jennifer Button and Liz Warden to sign on to his teams. MacDonald says every coach has their own style, and often the sport itself guides recruiting practices.
“Recruiting for swimming,” MacDonald says “is a lot different than it is for team sports, because I don’t need to see the athlete swim to know if they’re good or not.” MacDonald keeps track of swimmers’ performances, following careers from stats that get posted from age 10 and up.
Though he doesn’t have to see them, MacDonald explains “the best kids have to see me perform.”
So, during the summer, MacDonald also lends his skills to a Toronto swim club in order to stay involved in the overall swim community and get some exposure. During the rest of the year, this coach does two meet-and-greets where kids can check the campus, his team, and the city. He needs to add two or three athletes per year, and will recruit six or seven swimmers for each team per year.
As for recruiting advantages specific to U of T, MacDonald says he finds most Canadians stick close to home when they choose a university to attend. Toronto’s large population means a large talent pool. As well, the high quality of education and the breadth of programs are very attractive to prospective student athletes. For him, U of T’s difficult acceptance standards do not pose a problem. “Swimmers, by and large, are very good students.”
He estimates only a few other schools in Canada recruit harder than U of T, but says most top prospects are off the market from the outset. “The reason we don’t recruit unbelievably heavily the top-end kids is that about 90 per cent of them go to the United States,” he says. Not surprisingly, MacDonald says it comes down to the money American schools can give athletes.
As far as entrance scholarships are concerned in Canada, universities are permitted by the Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) association to offer them to students with 80 per cent averages. The Ontario University Athletics (OUA) association, however, chooses not to exercise this right.
There’s a “huge fear that we will end up with all the ills from the United States,” he says. But college level sports are a big source of revenue for American schools, unlike here in Canada. MacDonald doesn’t foresee compromised academic standards happening here, should scholarships be offered.
As it stands now, Macdonald confirms that over the last five years the number of athletes leaving Canada has risen 20-30 per cent. He credits the trend to the 90’s recession and rising tuition costs.
“The secret for us is if we had scholarships to give entering students, recruiting would be way more important.” Second-year awards are too hard to guarantee to incoming students.
Unlike MacDonald, recently-hired Steve Howlett, head coach of U of T’s football team, doesn’t have a winning team or long-time Blues coaching experience on his side. The team Howlett inherited when he signed on this fall, ended 2003 with a record of 0-8.
Not surprisingly then, Howlett says identifying and attracting athletes is a high priority for the football team. His task is to restore the program to its former glory. “Our recruiting is critical,” he explains.
Football requires many players each year, and the competition with other universities is stiff. He describes the present recruiting landscape as “ferociously competitive.”
“I don’t know if too many people realize that the football team will probably put in over a hundred hours a week into recruiting student-athletes,” he says. Howlett has recently brought part-time help on board devoted to this task alone.
“We spend a fair bit of time connecting to coaches by phone, by visiting games, by seeing games, by visiting them at their schools.” After that, says Howlett, the job consists of contacting the players and keeping in touch “very regularly for a very long period of time.”
About the entrance scholarships debate, Howlett says, “it is an issue that is going have to be revisited.
“I think the powers that be are concerned about how it’s going to affect academic integrity, but at the same time, universities in Ontario-especially U of T–want to attract top students and we may lose them. That’s a reality,” he says.
Liz Hoffman, director of U of T athletics and president of the Ontario University Athletics (OUA) association, is close to being one of the “powers that be.”
As far as any official athlete recruiting mandate goes for the university,
Hoffman says U of T is guided by the OUA’s and the CIS’s regulations which detail how many dollars can be spent visiting prospective students and other logistic concerns.
She says she works with the sport programs and meets athletes and their parents who tour the university. The department also puts out literature geared toward selling U of T athletics to high-school students.
Like MacDonald and Howlett, Hoffman highlights U of T’s location, the community and our wide range of programs as some of the keys to recruiting success.
“There’s certainly a great deal of concern by our coaches here at the University of Toronto, and all coaches within the OUA, as to the effect that scholarships have had,” Hoffman says, “and the drain of student-athletes to other conferences in Canada . . . and we’re going to have to research and document the students who are leaving our province.”
For those who support increasing the funding of entrance-level scholarships for exceptional athletes, Hoffman offers a glimmer of hope. “We need to revisit the dollar amount and we may need to revisit the academic component as well as the timing of the awarding of the award,” she says.
