Revisit week is an annual event for the Choate community, and for many current students, the week is full of excitement and energy as they try to attract as many accepted students to Choate as possible. For athletic teams in particular, the tactics used to draw prospective students involve a varied and complex process, requiring copious planning and great amounts of spirit from players and coaches.
Planning reaches as far back as December, when Mr. LJ Spinnato, Assistant Director of Admissions and Head Football Coach, instructed the players to send emails to prospective athletes, making sure that their questions were answered and that they felt welcomed. Tactics can also include physically searching for athletes who would be a good fit for the football team by combing through websites with clips of their performances, sending players to scout for students during football camps, and examining followers on Twitter for athletic and academic performance.
Coach Spinnato also revealed that waiting for students to come to Choate on their own is inefficient compared to making the effort to introduce students to Choate. He explained, “If a student has decided to apply to Choate, then chances are that he or she has applied to Andover, Deerfield, Exeter, and other similar top schools around the country.” However, he clarified, “You can go out and attract people to Choate specifically because of you, not because they’re already looking at boarding schools; that’s key, because then, you’re the only one in the market.” If a person with a friendly face and voice reaches out to them and suggests Choate, these prospective athletes are much more likely to choose Choate if accepted.
Clay Zachery ’19, a football captain, explained the process further. Social media, he said, plays a huge part in drawing students to Choate; the football team uses it regularly to reach out to prospective students. Accounts like Choate Football on Instagram are actively posting clips of the football season, and all Choate sports teams have large social media presences. Also, kids are assigned in groups to each football player. Their responsibility is to reach out to them through calling and texting.
What’s important, Zachery asserted, is that athletic teams never trash-talk other schools. “I remember when I was going around to schools, all they would do is trash Choate for some reason,” Zachery said. “I feel like you’ve just got to forget about the other schools and just try to promote Choate the best you can, because if you’re constantly spending time talking about the other schools, that’s all the kid’s going to think about.”
For smaller sports teams, the efforts remain similar, but applied on a smaller scale. Sam Stevenson ’19, a captain of the Girls’ Varsity Squash team, explained that “Squash is kind of unique … because the squash world is very small, and therefore everyone knows each other. So, the great thing about it is that almost all of the prospective students we have coming in, a member of the team knows somehow.” Familiar faces from club squash tournaments stand out— recruitment is therefore easier because prospective students and Choate recruiters already know each other.
Although the revisit days allow potential student-athletes to better understand Choate athletics by talking to coaches and players, the days also give student-athletes a broader understanding of what it’s like being a student at Choate. “We usually just play some clips from the season, and usually just talk to the kids about what we do at Choate,” Zachery explained. “We don’t really talk that much about football, because most of the time they know what we’re doing when it comes to football, so they want to know more about how we do our day-to-day activities.”
Coaches and players alike put in diligent effort from the winter until revisit days to recruit the very best athletes in football, squash, and more for Choate’s athletic teams, but also to provide prospective students more information about Choate.
