<p>jmilton, some of what Amherst13 isn’t entirely accurate. The majority of kids on NESCAC rosters (especially team sports like football, basketball, lacrosse soccer, where it is virtually all) are heavily recruited by coaches ahead of time. Amherst and Williams have exactly the same system. Each get 66 TIPS per year, basically kids who would not have much of a chance to get accepted without athletics. Most but not all of those kids apply early decision and they are spread throughout all sports, with football getting the biggest concentration. </p>
<p>Then there are another 100 plus (I forget the exact number, but it is well north of 100) “protects,” these are still recruited athletes who the coaches flag for admissions, but they have academic numbers that put them in the general ballpark for the general admission pool so they MIGHT get in without an athletic attribute. Of course, there are several thousand kids who apply with similar numbers, so being flagged by a coach is an ENORMOUS advantage to make you stand out among this big and ever growing pool. If you do the math, the vast majority of varsity athletes at both Williams and Amherst are, indeed, kids who the coaches recruited and who received an admissions edge accordingly, even if their academics are still very strong. Heck, even the TIPS at Williams and Amherst would get into many NESCAC schools without any athletic ability, so we aren’t talking kids who are egregiously underqualified like you see at many D-1 schools, but it can be a difference of 150 points on the SAT, for example. </p>
<p>Some sports like varsity crew are almost entirely composed of walk-ons, some like cross country and track and field have a good number of walk-ons, but I can tell you that you will rarely see (no more than 1-2 per sport per year, and that is generous) true walk-ons in the D-3 sense of the word (meaning, the coaches were not aware of them prior to their application / did not advocate for their admission) on a final ice hockey, or football, or basketball, or lacrosse varsity roster at ANY NESCAC school. More kids will try out, but it is rare for them to beat out kids who the coaches advocated for and knew about prior to admission. </p>
<p>In sum, being a recruited athlete at Williams and Amherst is just a HUGE advantage, similar to being an URM, MUCH more than being a typical alumni kid (other than a SUPER rich alumni kid). Obviously, the more the coach wants you, the more they will go to bat for you, and the coaches don’t always get the kids they most heavily advocate for if the academics are too much of a stretch. But yeah, the idea that it is very common to walk on, with no involvement during the admissions process by a coach, to a team sport with a limited roster at Amherst or Williams is in large part a fiction. </p>
<p>Now, all that being said, half the student body at both schools are NOT seriously involved in athletics, so it’s not as if this is a dominant culture. And most of the athletes at Williams (and I’m sure at Amherst) are not defined solely by their athletic prowess. That is what makes NESCAC so great – you have star athletes in acapella groups, or leading student government, or leading community service orgs, or getting 3.9’s in physics majors, or playing the lead in theater productions. So while NESCACs have a MUCH higher percentage of kids participating in club or varsity athletics than you will find at virtually any other school, they also have a MUCH higher percentage of varsity athletes who are seriously involved in non-athletic extracurricular pursuits in addition to their sports.</p>