It quickly became clear, however, that the pandemic had slammed the window shut on scholarship opportunities for the fall of 2021. The athletes in the program were supportive when she reached out, and the diving team’s coaches were the quickest to help Howard build a pathway to get her across the border and onto an NCAA team. And so she did a deep dive of her own, connecting with current athletes in the programs through Instagram to get a feel for the schools.Īs she went through the process, it was the University of Pennsylvania that won her over. A coach couldn’t really tell you what life is like in the dorms, what the learning environment is like, or how the food in the cafeteria tastes. She had Zoom meetings with coaches, but she knew she wanted a lot more information about the schools before making a choice. “So that's why when COVID hit I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I need to do all this research on my own, because I can't just rely on visiting the schools anymore.’” “I was relying on going on those visits and actually seeing the schools,” she says.
… I found there was a lot of confusion going on.” Realizing that no one had a game plan for international college recruiting in a pandemic, she set about building one for herself. And even all the coaches were kind of like, ‘Yeah, I don't know.’ I wasn't really getting an answer. “You notice people, like in the States, all around you announcing their commitments,” she says. But for me, it seemed a lot harder.”Īs weeks turned to months, the process stayed at a standstill. “And I think being an international student made it even harder because there were students in the States taking these tests and verbally committing to schools and not really having a big issue. “It was just not working out with COVID,” she says. Instead of finishing off her jump to the college level with a perfect entry, she was thrown way off course mid-flight. to take the standardized tests needed to get into an NCAA school either. “That’s kind of when it started to get all weird.”Ĭampuses shut down and the border closed. “All of a sudden COVID hit, so no one really knew what to do,” says Howard. It was a year’s worth of work – built on top of a decade’s worth of intense diving training – and it was finally coming to an exciting end. The visits were the key – which campus, coaching staff and team would wow her the most, and which school would offer that scholarship she was looking for. She made one official recruiting visit to Princeton in the fall of 2019 and had several more lined up for April of 2020. In Grade 10 she started contacting coaches at a number of Ivy League colleges, researching the schools, the diving programs, the student life. The Handsworth student, then in Grade 11, had already been grinding through the process for a year. In the spring of 2020, North Vancouver elite diver Sadie Howard was just weeks away from finishing the daunting and demanding process of committing to an NCAA university program. The elite athlete has committed to the University of Pennsylvania for the fall of 2022. supplied by Sadie Howard North Vancouver's Sadie Howard performs a dive.
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