UW recruiting question.

[leg turk]

Grades... I've heard rumors that it's quite difficult to get into Madison because of the gpa requirements. My question is , do the students that are wrestling ,have the same gpa requirements as football or basketball players? If not, why?

[No One Cares]

This article is a tad outdated (2015), but may help answer some questions.

https://badgerherald.com/features/2015/11/10/when-it-comes-to-recruiting-next-seasons-badgers-uw-admissions-gets-final-word/

But, then once they get in, looks like it isn't too hard to stay eligible.

https://uwbadgers.com/sports/2015/8/21/GEN_20140101388.aspx?id=388

[vsmf2010]

Grades... I've heard rumors that it's quite difficult to get into Madison because of the gpa requirements. My question is , do the students that are wrestling ,have the same gpa requirements as football or basketball players? If not, why?

I spoke to TB about this a few years back when he was an assistant at the UW. I have laid out that conversation on this forum a few times before but would be happy to again if anyone would like me to.

[leg turk]

Grades... I've heard rumors that it's quite difficult to get into Madison because of the gpa requirements. My question is , do the students that are wrestling ,have the same gpa requirements as football or basketball players? If not, why?

I spoke to TB about this a few years back when he was an assistant at the UW. I have laid out that conversation on this forum a few times before but would be happy to again if anyone would like me to.

Yes please.

[DocWrestling]

Sports like basketball and football have much greater leeway for getting in lower level students.  Which probably makes sense since they fund all the other sports.

Coaches in non-revenue sports have to pick their battles with getting in students with lower academic standards.

With that said the university won't go as low as other universities even in football and basketball.

It is not always GPA.  Sometimes it number of core courses.  Other states do not require as many core courses to graduate as Wisconsin high schools require. 

[TomM]

This may or may not be the case any longer, but 'class rank', at one time, was also a consideration. I may be off a bit on this, but I believe prospective student/athletes had to be in the top 10% of their class rank as well.

[vsmf2010]

Grades... I've heard rumors that it's quite difficult to get into Madison because of the gpa requirements. My question is , do the students that are wrestling ,have the same gpa requirements as football or basketball players? If not, why?

I spoke to TB about this a few years back when he was an assistant at the UW. I have laid out that conversation on this forum a few times before but would be happy to again if anyone would like me to.

Yes please.

Below is what I posted a few years ago. I have no idea how the portal and the increased transfers have impacted how this is looked at because there would be quite a few more athletes not graduating from the original university because of the current high rate of transfers.

As far as the "athlete exception" I had that discussion a while back with a Badger wrestling assistant coach at that time and he explained that to me in this way.

He said the admission standard was the same for all students regardless if they were athletes or not and at the time it was a 3.8 GPA and a 28 ACT (I think that is right). If you had really high ACT they gave you some room on the GPA but if you were under 28 it was going to be a long shot.

He said they were able to appeal to get athletes in who were below this and you could get some of them in. If the "athlete exceptions" graduated your future requests were generally looked on favorably but if they did not it became harder and harder to get the wrestlers who were below the line excepted. He said at that present time (this was a few years back) they had had some exceptions drop out and/or not graduate and that they were not able to get anyone in who fell below the standard admission standards.

I have no idea if the same rules apply for all sports, if anything has changed or what they do at the other schools but this is first hand knowledge from a Badger assistant back when Barry was the head coach.

[nutman]

https://www.wisn.com/article/new-law-guarantees-high-achieving-wisconsin-students-a-spot-at-uw-madison-other-state-schools/46893008

https://www.wpr.org/news/wisconsin-top-5-percent-high-school-students-uw-madison-admissions

It outlines changes to admission.

[leg turk]

We get a lot of complaints on this forum of the UW not landing all of our homegrown in state studs. I wonder how many of them just don't have the high standard grades to get in. It seems like nobody even brings that up. There is no way ALL of these studs have 3.80 grades or 28 on the ACT test.

[asdf]

UW has been test optional for years, meaning ANY applicant is not required to submit ACT/SAT.   Per their federal reporting, only 36% of applicants submitted ACT last year.  Majority of schools in the US are test optional now.

3.8 is the average. Lots of kids get admitted with less gpa's, so safe to assume Athletes do as well.

Per UW own federal reporting, academic rigor, state residency, gpa, extra curriculars, essay, and recommendations are all considered "very important" in admissions.

Retention and graduation rates are very important to UW, and kids quitting or transfers out would be huge problems for a coach.

Good recruiters and families can leverage one positive to counterbalance a negative.  Assume UW is same as most programs and look at the whole incoming class as a pool.  "Gpa recruits" are out there.

Penn, Bucknell, Michigan, Stanford, Cornell, Navy, Princeton, the whole EIWA conference all have the same to probably higher academic standards and are able to recruit national qualifiers.

Saw on twitter that Peyton Mocco is working on his PhD.  Keaton Kleuver is in one of the better MBA programs and NQ this year at Hofstra.  wrestling actually produces lots of extremely intelligent students.

Plenty of other UW non-revenue sports are able to get great recruits and finish better then 8th in the Big Ten.

[WrestlerSB80]

Leg turk, my guess is most of them have 3.8 or higher. I don't think academics is the reason why kids don't go to UW.

[charteroak1]

I thought the student athlete had three categories that they had to use for acceptance.  GPA, Class Rank and Test Scores.  If you fit in two of the three minimum standards you could possibly enter UW.  Now with the test game out of the equation, I'm not sure if this is still used or not.  I do recall the coaches stating that they can fight for one possibly two kids to be accepted without hitting those minimums, but those kids needed to have tutoring assigned to them for the first semester.  I believe the last kid that didn't hit those marks but became eligible by attending MTC was Ryan Taylor and he turned out to be a pretty good asset at 125.

I'm sure there might be one or two of the D1 kids from Wisconsin out there that would need to be a "Special Consideration", but for the most part if they were able to get into Minnesota, Missouri, Penn St. they could get into UW, they just choose not to. 

[honestabe]

We get a lot of complaints on this forum of the UW not landing all of our homegrown in state studs. I wonder how many of them just don't have the high standard grades to get in. It seems like nobody even brings that up. There is no way ALL of these studs have 3.80 grades or 28 on the ACT test.

The University of Wisconsin is able to make exceptions for athletes in regards to grades as long as it is within reason and everyone involved agrees that the student athlete will be guided and supported along the way to keep them eligible. To insinuate that the reason the Wisconsin natives havent been going to UW because of lack of grades is a ridiculous arguement when these schools (Minnesota, Penn State, Missouri) are relatively close to Wisconsins standards. Not the same but close enough. Instead of addressing the more obvious reason because we don't want to be viewed as a hater. The fact is most kids in Wisconsin do not want to wrestle for Chris Bono. We have all heard many reasons why and not many things disputing them. I say we just swallow the pill and move on with someone who kids in Wisconsin actually want to wrestle for?

[littleguy301]

OK, I serious doubt all athletes have a 28 or 3.8 or even a combo of that.  There has been many athletes that have gone to UW with far lower ACT and GPA. Sure that what is told but if there is a will there is a way.

Sure I bet grades help with kids bot going to Madison. Not doubting that.

Today's kids re not the Homer's we were. Ask a kid what there favorite team is and I bet you hear alot of different choices other than Wisconsin. Home school college team isn't the run away winner.

Today's political climate I believe has some thing to do with it also. Madison is very liberal and if your from a conservative family the wild party school may not be the place.

Today's kids talk, current college kids talk alot because they all were on tournament teams, dual teams, travel together and if a kid leaves a school they could burn it to the ground and I bet several younger kids hear that and make up their own mind they aren't going.

Bono need to be more visible.  Askren is on many forms of social media and hard to dispute him when the head coach isn't making his way around the state or at least reaching out to several kids. People's minds are made up after hearing several askrens talks and not a single come back from Bono or even being regular on his jump around stuff. Get out and be seen and heard!

It isn't always Bono in this. Older training areas, hard to get into, family dynamics, lack of knowledge of what and who the coaches are. Which one is the easiest to fix?

[MNbadger]

" Madison is very liberal and if your from a conservative family the wild party school may not be the place."
So you think they get there and are forced to "party"?  Every school is a party school if you want it to be.  I respectfully disagree with this being a factor.