How Brown University recruits and admits its athletes

Most students who apply to Brown toil over their application without guidance from anyone affiliated with the University. But the avenue for admission is slightly different for recruited athletes compared to the rest of the student body.

Approximately 14% of the student body comprise Brown’s 34 varsity teams, many of whose members are recruited while still in high school. The Herald spoke to people directly involved in the recruiting process to learn about the admissions process for recruited athletes.

Brown has two primary goals in athletics recruiting, said Colleen Kelly ’06, the senior associate director of athletics recruiting and retention.

“One is finding the right fit,” Kelly said. “We want you to come here and have a really great experience.” The second is to make Brown’s athletic programs competitive. “But that’s not going to happen unless you find the right fit on the front end of recruiting,” Kelly said.

Kelly works with all of Brown’s coaches, “from the time a coach identifies a prospective student-athlete on their respective playing surface, all the way through the time until they matriculate at Brown,” she said. She also acts as the liaison between Athletics and the Office of College Admission.

Recruiting begins with athletics and admissions leaders determining how many student-athletes will be “formally supported” in the admissions process, University Spokesperson Brian Clark wrote in an email to The Herald. “Athletics then determines how to allocate these across its varsity teams, and the number varies by team.”

After setting the number, the University’s admissions team conducts “a thorough pre-application evaluation of academic credentials” of a prospective applicant pool before deeming which students are “likely to be admitted based on that initial review,” he added.

There are specific criteria for athletes to be admitted, Kelly said. She works with coaches to determine whether a prospective student meets Brown’s academic standards.

The Ivy League uses an Academic Index, a numerical measure of a prospective athlete’s high school academic performance. According to Kelly, each team’s AI must remain within two standard deviations of the student body average.

“The Ivy League provides that metric for us. It’s based on the overall student body population, and the student-athletes have to be representative of the overall student body population,” Kelly told The Herald. “Every student admitted to Brown and every student that matriculates at Brown has an academic index attached to their name, and then the student-athlete population is two standard deviations away from what that overall student body is.”

The Ivy League gave Brown an AI of 217.3 this year, according to Kelly. While the factors used to calculate the AI fluctuate by year, the typical factors that determine the score are a student’s GPA and test scores.

This practice ensures “that student-athletes meet the same academic standards as other students,” Clark wrote. “The academic profiles of our incoming student-athletes are consistent with those of Brown’s overall student body.” He also highlighted Brown’s high academic rankings within the National Collegiate Athletic Association, commonly known as the NCAA.

Once students formally apply, “admissions officers review and make decisions about every applicant individually,” Clark wrote. Most of the applicants have already been vetted by the initial review process.

Though Clark acknowledged that most students admitted through this process ultimately enroll at Brown, “we don’t yield every prospective student-athlete even after this extensive process,” he said.

Of Brown’s class of 2028, 14% of students admitted early decision were recruited athletes. 83% of the class’ recruited athletes were admitted early, according to The Herald’s first-year poll.

Ben Taylor ’27, a football player from Oregon, spent a year after high school completing a post-grad year — essentially a second senior year of high school — in order to improve his chances of playing football at an academically rigorous university.

The summer before his post-grad year started, Taylor participated in a recruitment camp at Brown and verbally committed to the University by the end of June.

During recruiting camps, coaches run drills as if they would during real practice for prospective recruits, who then compete against each other.

Taylor noted that many Brown students are confused about the recruiting process and assume athletes are automatically accepted. Taylor emphasized that he doesn’t think this is true.

“The thing that people don’t really realize about the athletes is that a lot of us had the same GPAs in high school, took the same classes,” he said. “But there’s also the part that people forget: how much time goes into playing a sport.”

Recruitment processes also look different depending on the sport. Jordan Wiseman ’27, who plays rugby, said that “because rugby is not that well known,” the recruiting process looks different.

While Taylor was contacted by football coaches, Wiseman took the initiative to reach out to Brown’s rugby coach.

When Wiseman attended an unofficial campus tour, she had already sent game tapes to coaches. After watching the Brown team compete, she met with the coach the next day, who told Wiseman that “we want you” and gave Wiseman an “SAT minimum score,” encouraging her to maintain her GPA and keep sending game videos.

As a student at Brown, Wiseman also helps organize visits in the spring for recruited rugby players. She said her own campus visit as a prospective student-athlete sealed the deal for her enrollment. When she assumed the position, she did so to provide potential recruits with a similar experience.

During their visits, prospective recruits have the opportunity to get to know members of the team, watch practice and spend the night in a dorm.

But Wiseman, unlike Taylor, did not apply early decision. Instead, she received her regular decision “likely letter” about two weeks before official decisions were released.

Emma Zwall ’25 was recruited for the track and field and cross country teams, but is no longer on the teams. She said that her experience looked slightly different because she applied during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I never went on an official visit,” Zwall said. Instead, the process consisted of “a lot of phone calls” and a Zoom call with the team.

Former Brown athletes have an ongoing lawsuit against all eight Ivy League colleges for their lack of athletic scholarships. The Ivy League is the only Division I athletic conference that does not provide athletic scholarships.

“All financial aid awarded by Brown is need-based, meaning that no factors are considered except the family’s demonstrated financial need,” the University website reads. “We are committed to meeting 100% of demonstrated financial need for undergraduates.”

Over the last few years, athletic recruitment has been the focus of scrutiny. The infamous 2019 scandal, “Operation Varsity Blues,” uncovered a scheme in which wealthy parents bribed their child’s way into universities under the guise of athletic recruitment. Brown was not one of the universities named in the case.

Through Brown’s winding recruitment process, Kelly said she tries to identify who will fit well with the University’s culture. In her meetings with prospective students, “you can tell when that excites a prospect,” she said. “You could tell that they’re gonna have a really great experience here when those are the reasons why they’re choosing Brown.”