It's interesting how some of those midwestern schools with reserve teams list a separate reserve team roster, while others list everyone on the same roster and include them in the same team photo, making it difficult for a recruit to know the real size of the varsity roster and how the school uses its reserve team.
In the CCIW, Carthage is an example of the former. It has a JV team roster of 38 and a schedule of 14 games (the Varsity has 43 listed on its roster, but 8-10 of those appear to be guys double rostered on the JV team, like some extra GKs). By doing this, it suggests that the JV team practices separately and a few of those players are also invited to practice with and be available for the varsity. On the other hand, both squads traveled to Texas to play games against Concordia in September, even though Concordia doesn't list a separate JV team and the JV team did list a mid-week red v. white scrimmage that could have been varsity players who didn't play in the game the day before v. JV.
https://athletics.carthage.edu/sports/jv-mens-soccer/roster
North Park, by contrast, lists a roster of 60, has a team photo with 60 players, and only lists a separate reserve team schedule and doesn't identify who played in those games.
https://athletics.northpark.edu/sports/mens-soccer/roster
That's more a function of sports information staffing and priorities at the D3 level than anything else. I can't remember the last time I saw a D3 school post JV stats or box scores on its website for
any sport, including football and men's basketball.
Hard to imagine that North Park could hold integrated practices with 60 players, but you can't really tell from the website.
North Park holds separate practices for the varsity and the reserves. Given the size of the coaching staff, it's just not feasible to run one practice with a roster that large.
Elmhurst, North Central, and Illinois Wesleyan are on the JV team schedules for both North Park and Carthage, but don't mention that they have reserve teams on their website at all and just list really large varsity rosters. Since they aren't the 60-70 total players on Carthage or North Park, that suggests there may not be a fixed group and who plays in those games may change from week to week.
The same is true of fellow CCIW programs Carroll and Millikin, although in reality none of those CCIW programs goes tremendously deep into its roster in terms of varsity rotation. Illinois Wesleyan is an exception, since head coach Kyle Schauls is a firm believer in using two shifts of players (21 of the Titans saw action in ten or more varsity games in 2021, and five other Titans appeared in nine). You pretty much know ahead of time which players you're going to see in any given CCIW contest, unless it's a blowout.
While I can't speak conclusively for any program other than NPU's, the impression I have of the Carthage program is that, despite the roster overlap, the Firebirds really do run discrete varsity and JV teams. NPU definitely does -- although it's certainly not unheard of for Vikings reserves to move up to the varsity in mid-season.
Also, the size of the rosters can be deceiving. A very large percentage of NPU's roster consists of walk-ons, and I strongly suspect that much of Carthage's roster is likewise annually made up of self-recruited players. As one would expect, attrition is pretty pronounced among the walk-ons, once they come to the realization that they really don't have what it takes to reach the varsity level in a program that's that good, and they drop away ... after having already appeared in the team picture.
In any event, none of this is really the wrong approach. I personally like transparency from the standpoint of not misleading recruits, but if a coach really uses the reserve team games for anyone on the roster who didn't play that week, it certainly makes sense not to label kids as one or the other. It shouldn't take web sleuthing, though, to figure all of this out.
I agree that it would be helpful to split the roster on the website, but there's so much in-season fluidity there that it'd be next to impossible to keep it up to date, anyway.
Again, though, this is to a certain degree about walk-ons rather than recruits if we're talking specifically about NPU and Carthage. I won't speak for Carthage here (especially since there was a coaching regime change made this off-season up in Kenosha), but nobody's being misled at North Park. The mere fact that the NPU men's soccer page features a team picture with sixty guys in Vikings kits, plus a reserve schedule, informs any prospect before he's even spoken to head coach Kris Grahn or one of his assistants that there is a lot more competition for a varsity spot at NPU than there is at, say, Millikin or Elmhurst, and that, unless he's an elite recruit who had a lot of other opportunities, there's a very good chance that he'll be playing with the reserves as a freshman.