One of the first orders of business for the athletic department during its recruiting-improvement effort was to establish the Recruiting Coordinator position, which was filled by Head Men’s Lacrosse Coach John Raba. Not long after came an overhaul of the department’s recruiting information database.

“[A prospective student-athlete] would fill out a profile…we would recopy it into our file, and then we’d turn that over to Admissions,” said Raba of the old system.

Over the summer, the days of manual entry ended. On July 1 the department officially began using the services of Front Rush, a web-based recruiting service based in Silver Spring, Md.

“It’s a web-based service, so when an applicant or a prospective student-athlete decides to fill out the questionnaire, it automatically goes into our recruiting database,” Raba explained. “So we’re taking away some of the process by using this service.”

In addition to streamlining the recruiting process, Front Rush provides many other benefits for the department. The system allows coaches to send e-mails to recruits using a custom template rather than a white background. The database also includes a number of pre-written e-mails, including a letter thanking the recruit for his/her/hir interest and a message from President Michael Roth. It allows the coach to view the status of the e-mail, including the date and time it was opened or deleted. Front Rush also allows coaches to track and record all of their communications with a recruit: e-mails, phone calls, and letters. Coaches can also send out the same e-mail to a group of prospective student athletes; Front Rush will automatically customize each e-mail with the recipient’s first name.

“It elevates the whole professionalism of what we’re trying to do as a department,” Raba said of the e-mail system. “Kids want to see those things; they want to see that schools are willing to do whatever they need to court them to come to their school. This is a nice way to do that, and it also gives us the ability to contact them and stay in constant contact with them at any given point during this process.”

Since Front Rush is a web-based service, coaches can access a prospective student’s information at any time from any location.

“If I forgot…Joe Smith’s number on a piece of paper at work and I’m supposed to call him tonight, I don’t have to worry about that if he’s already in my system,” said Raba. “You can do it from home or wherever and have the ability to look up that kid’s information, get the phone number, write your notes down, right from the web.”

Raba also noted that the switch to Front Rush allows for better coordination within the department.

“A lot of [the old system] was independent within our department,” he said. “This gives us more functionality to…manage our system a lot better than the old system. We’ve got 29 varsity teams; everyone had their own system in place.”

In addition to making player-coach interaction easier and more personable, Front Rush also provides organizational capabilities. Coaches can sort recruits by virtually any category, both academic and athletic.

“If you want to know all the kids that are visiting this weekend, you can pull that list up, or you want to know all the kids who have a 2100 on the SAT, you can pull up that list,” Raba explained. “That allows all of our coaches to be able to sort and find the information that we need quickly and get [it] over to the admissions office.”

The switch to Front Rush has also allowed coaches to increase the amount of information they can gather about a recruit. Previously, all prospective student-athletes would fill out the same questionnaire, which included biographical, academic, and athletic information. Athletic information, however, was limited to the student’s position, statistics and honors, and current coach’s contact information. Front Rush generates a specific questionnaire for each sport, allowing coaches to customize the information they request. The men’s lacrosse questionnaire, for example, asks prospective student-athletes for jersey number, team colors, and shooting hand, and it allows students to submit a link to an online highlight video. The “Prospective Students” link, which formerly went directly to the all-sport questionnaire, now takes users to a page that includes contact information for the coach, instructions on what to submit (e.g. an unofficial transcript and full game tape), and link to the sport’s questionnaire.

Currently, all sports except for golf, men’s and women’s tennis, and football have switched to Front Rush. Football has long had its own separate recruiting questionnaire—although the data still needs to be entered manually—and is not switching to Front Rush.

According to Raba, the department looked into several different services and also evaluated the feasibility of having ITS design a system before settling on Front Rush.

“It was the one that made the most sense for us as a department,” he explained. “We felt like it did all the things we want to do functionality-wise.”

A total of 223 colleges and universities nationwide use Front Rush, in addition to Pennsbury High School in Fairless Hills, Pa. Four of Wesleyan’s NESCAC peers – Colby, Connecticut College, Trinity, and Tufts – also use the service, but Wesleyan is the only school in the conference that has unified the entire department with the system, instead of having each coach use it individually with no interdepartmental coordination.

According to Raba, the coordination within the athletic department benefits Admissions as well.

“When we meet with Admissions, [they] can pull up the information they need from our system now,” he explained. “They…want to know the notes and what we’ve said about these kids…and they want to know where we saw [them]. They really wouldn’t have that information [under the old system], so it really helps.”

The switch to Front Rush and the establishment of the Recruiting Coordinator for Athletics have formed the backbone of a university-wide attempt to improve Wesleyan’s ability to attract top-tier student-athletes, an initiative spearheaded by University President Michael Roth.

“Athletics at Wesleyan are an important component of the student life experience, and we seek to achieve excellence in all aspects of the undergraduate experience,” said Roth. “As such, we have enhanced our efforts to recruit strong scholar-athletes. [Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost] Joe Bruno, [Director of Athletics] John Biddiscombe and John Raba are leading this effort [and] have my full and enthusiastic support.”