Retention (2022)

Time for the yearly retention article or as it was known when it first came out, “early retirement”. I’ve gone through each roster now published and tracked the players that have left the program not due to your typical senior graduation. This is basically your roster turnover and your first thought might be to think that the players just quit. In reality that’s just one reason without any depth behind the decision. We also have injuries and financial issues and early graduation and my boyfriend lives too far away (yes, that was a reason and it’s still a stupid reason). For the most part, the turnover is not an institutional problem, but I do think consistent turnover (or lack of retention) is something potential recruits should look at with a program.

I’m doing this retention article about a week later than normal and this is where I would track schools that didn’t have their rosters published. Well, everyone’s is published so I can’t complain about this. Still, I’m leaving below the schools that have been late in the past as a reminder of who has annoyed me. Special kudos to Lewis & Clark for being included in this article for the first time ever!

Cal Lutheran: 2018

Chapman: 2021

Howard Payne: 2019, 2021

La Verne: 2018

Lewis & Clark: 2018, 2019, 2021

Linfield: 2018, 2021

Occidental: 2021

Pacific: 2018, 2019, 2021

PLU: 2018, 2021

Redlands: 2018, 2019

I will be giving out a retention percentage below. This is calculated as 1 – (non-seniors leaving/(total roster – graduating seniors)). Keep in mind that this doesn’t give credit to schools that have graduated seniors sticking around. Until Southwestern can figure out how to do this, I frown on this process. (My joke from last year but I still find this funny!)

We only had two schools retain 100% of their non-seniors this year in Southwestern and Whitman. Could there be errors in my research? Yes, but that is what I came up with. Here are the schools with perfect retention since 2018:

George Fox 2018

Colorado College 2018

Cal Lutheran 2018

CMS 2018

Pacific Lutheran 2019

Pomona-Pitzer 2018

Redlands 2018

St Thomas 2019

Southwestern 2021

Whitman 2021

Again, this is a highly manual process so please forgive any errors on my part. Regardless, not a lot of schools are able to keep their entire squad from one year to the next. Just too many real-life issues out there.

Here were the schools that retained 85% or more student-athletes this past year:

Southwestern – 100% Whitman – 100% CMS – 94.4% Chapman – 93.8% Pacific Lutheran – 93.3% Cal Lutheran – 92.3% Lewis & Clark – 88.9% Willamette – 88.9% Caltech – 88.9% Colorado College – 88.2% George Fox – 87.5% Pacific – 86.7% St Thomas – 86.7%

We actually had pretty good numbers as I usually look at 75% or above but got tired of typing in schools.

We had only ever had one school with under 50% retention but we’ve got another in Occidental who checks in at 37.5%. Sul Ross State is at 52.6% and Mary Hardin-Baylor is at 58.8% but everyone else is 60% or higher.

Since I went through the rosters, here are some additional items of interest:

• Largest roster goes to Linfield at 23. This is actually a low max number from previous years.

• Smallest roster goes to Occidental at 11.

• Most number of returners is CMS at 17. (Linfield is next at 16.)

• Dallas and Occidental have the least number of returners at 6 apiece.

• Puget Sound and Lewis & Clark looked to have lost the most seniors with 8 apiece.

• Most number of first-year recruits goes to ETBU and Dallas with 11 apiece.

• Smallest number of first-year recruits goes to George Fox with 1.

One of the hardest things to track are the transfers. I have 31 in Region X (including UC Santa Cruz), but some of these may be players that came from a JV program or took a year off from volleyball while in the school. I have three listed for both Concordia and Chapman and this is the largest for any one program.

One of the last things I do with this is compare the rosters against my statistics loss numbers. Schools that saw a negative jump in losses (i.e., they lost more statistics than I originally thought) were (more than 10%):

• Howard Payne went from 16.4% to 37.4%

• McMurry went from 26.9% to 68.3%

• Mary Hardin-Baylor went from 45.2% to 63.4%

• Linfield went from 15.5% to 29.9%

• Schreiner went from 7.6% to 27.3%

• Occidental went from 21.9% to 56.3%

• Pomona-Pitzer went from 11.3% to 22.8%

• Redlands went from 42.4% to 73.7%

We actually see teams get better in statistics loss because they snuck in a Super Senior (or I messed up previously).

• Sul Ross State went from 38.3% down to 20.2%

• Whitworth went from 31.2% down to 13%

I think those changes were due to Annika Canaba and Maddie Lee coming back. Both were Players of the Year for their conferences so nice bonus for those programs.

The only school with 0% statistics loss (La Verne) actually had some players leave early so they are up to a huge 1.9% points loss now.

I’ve got a QWI article coming out either tomorrow or Wednesday and then schedules, which I haven’t started. Matches start on Thursday!!!