Athlete Recruitment Effect on Admissions

By Shifan Shaffe Last updated Apr 3, 2025

SLU athletics is grappling with decreasing admissions in their recruiting of prospective student athletes. PHOTO CREDIT: SAINTS ATHLETICS

Varsity athletics are making a strong push to effectively retain more students for the university despite St. Lawrence University’s admissions decreasing annually. Student-athletes, coaches and faculty face many problems, as they try to overcome the halt of admissions in various ways.

Franco Bari, director of intercollegiate athletics, does not see lower admissions affecting recruiting. “I would say that there are now different challenges and barriers that are roadblocks to moving forward with kind of the efforts that we’ve utilized in the past,” said Bari. Some of these strategies include enhanced campus visits, personalized tours and panels, direct outreach by administrators, and overall stronger collaboration between athletics and admissions.

According to Bari, collegiate enrollment has declined since Covid-19, but SLU is noticing positive shifts in recruiting student-athletes. “Each institution has put their best foot forward to come up with strategies to try to find out what the best approaches would be to counter those challenges,” said Bari.

Adam McGee, captain of the varsity men’s rowing team, said that low enrollment causes challenges for niche sports like rowing. “On top of an institution that doesn’t have a large student product, to begin with, low admissions then cut our numbers even further and makes our creating numbers more difficult,” said McGee, “it is a smaller institution and so kind of getting the name out there is a little difficult sometimes.”

According to McGee, “people on the institutional level aren’t as active maybe in the recruiting process as it would be appreciated to be.” McGee is uncertain why the institution isn’t assisting as much with recruiting. However, he notices a lack thereof in their efforts.

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Broderick Pinto, captain of the varsity men’s tennis team, says his team focuses more on international players because Europeans have stronger youth programs. “International players are hard to get to the Division Three level, but when they do, they’re always a big hit,” said Pinto, “a lot of the players over there are looking to come to the United States to play in college.”

Pinto acknowledges that Tavis Rieger, coach of the men’s tennis team, has been vigilant – and he’s brought many recruits on board. According to Pinto, “We have about the same number of kids coming in this year as we did last year, may even more.” Pinto said that Rieger wants to recruit players he can develop instead of players who can make a difference right away. “He hasn’t gotten any standout players yet, but he’s getting kids that are good fits for the program,” said Pinto.

Tina Tao, executive director for Advising, Retention and Student Success, says that student-athletes are less likely to transfer after their first year. According to Tao, in 2022 and 2023, the retention rate for varsity student-athletes was 3.4 percent and 4.2 percent higher than non-varsity student-athlete retention rates, respectively. “Part of the reason why student athletes tend to kind of feel connected and more committed to St. Lawrence is because of that early connection that they make with their athletic team and with the coaches,” said Tao.