College athletic programs: When does it become too much?

Parents Forum
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@northwesty, the situations just are not analogous. In one situation, the athletic department actually decides which kids to admit. In the other, the athletic department gets some amorphous level of slack from the admissions department. Through my son’s, and a few of his former teammates experiences, I have pretty complete information about how recruiting works (at least for revenue sports) at the Ivys, NESCAC, Duke, Vandy, AIr Force, Navy, Army, ND, Michigan, Northwestern and Stanford. With the exception of Stanford and the service academies, all of the FBS schools guarantee admission to recruits (not only scholarship recruits but recruited walk ons). The military academies require higher initial standards and a character and fitness review, but operate the same way. Stanford is kind of half way between the AD controls admissions/NCAA eligibility standards schools and the Ivy/NESCAC “only admissions admits” model. Stanford requires a completed application and then requires recruits to go through an abbreviated admissions review, not dissimilar to a likely letter review, although anecdotally they have more elastic standards than the Ivys. How Stanford can compete at the top of D1 with that process is a mystery to me. I know for a fact they lost out on at least one 4 star guy in recent years because they could not guarantee admission without this admissions review, and the recruit and his family were concerned that if the recruit applied, word would get out to other high profile schools and offers would disappear, leaving him somewhat high and dry if he was declined by Stanford.

At its most basic, if a school like Vanderbilt, for example, operated similar to the Ivy, or NESCAC, then the football players at Vandy (as an example) would have to have academic numbers in the same ballpark as the general student body. Instead, because Vandy gives the AD control over a certain number of admission slots, the only requirement is that the recruit meets NCAA standards. It is a big difference. Since you have kids of dissimilar academic backgrounds and maybe skills, athletes tend to cluster to certain courses and majors, and require substantial tutoring help which not only is fertile ground for the type of thing we saw at NC, but leads to even more self segregation than is inherent in the difference between athletes and normal kids.

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@ohiodad51 I can attest to the recruitment at Stanford. I know personally a kid that floats between a 3-4 star football recruit. Works hard in the classroom, solid grades 3.7 or so…but not a fantastic test taker, but also not horrible. He had a recorded score just short of 1900, but Stanford was urging him to do a second try, he passed and signed with another Pac12 team. That says a lot…

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Squash is becoming more of an urban sport. There’s an excellent program in Boston and Lawrence MA (a low-income city north of Boston) that teaches inner-city kids of color to play squash. The program also includes tutoring, mentoring, community service and college counseling. 99% of these kids end up in college, some at NESCACs or Ivies. A fair number end up being recruited for squash.
http://squashbusters.org/impact/college/

From Squash Magazine:

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Sorry, right, MIT doesn’t provide scholarships (well, the school doesn’t). But the nudge from the coach for crew actually counts for something at MIT (not nearly as true for other sports at MIT).

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@boolaHI, yeah I agree, and that is exactly what I am talking about. Sure Stanford is a very unique blend of top of the heap academics and elite football. But Notre Dame (or Cal for that matter if you want to stay on the left coast) can come in and tell a kid as a sophomore or junior that as long as they are eligible they are good to go, while Stanford is telling them they have to apply, retest, whatever. It is a hard sell in that context.

@Sue22, I am a big proponent of athletics, and the impact they can have on underprivileged young people. Personally, the only reason I was able to go to college (or even thought of it in the first place) was because people were willing to pay for it if I agreed to run in to other large men. So whatever outreach is being done by squash coaches, or tennis, or lax, or whomever is a net positive. But there is a long way to go before a lot of these smaller sports reach the immersion level in certain demographics.

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Oh brother. You are just on a witch hunt aren’t you? If you read my post carefully, I also said:

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So, if that suppose to reconcile the first statement??

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There are inner city lacrosse programs, but they struggle and perhaps one player out of 100 really gets a chance at playing at a higher level. There is a documentary, Citylax, which shows how hard people work to get the kids involved, get donations of equipment, field time, referees, coaches, transportation, uniforms. On a suburban club team, the fee can be $300 to $800 for the season. The city team charges nothing, so all the costs have to be recovered through donations, plus the city team provides transportation to field across town as the families cannot.

My kids played with the team a few times just to bring the numbers up to field a team. (DD#1 was the only white kid on the team). One day we traveled about an hour from the city, it was windy and snowing, and our kids had snow jackets from kmart with their team tshirts pulled on over their jackets, wet soggy sneakers, jeans, no gloves. The suburban team we played looked like they were Team Nike with black leggings, turtle necks, gloves, waterproof cleats. But from that ragtag team, two girls got the opportunity to go to a prep school for middle school and high school and now play in college. They couldn’t have done that from city schools, they had to leave the public schools and get into the prep school feeder program to be seen by college recruiters. They also got scholarships to the summer club team, traveled in the summer to the tournaments and showcase. There is no money for the entire inner city team to get that, but one or two players can. There is a national organization called Bridge that sends city teams to tournaments from Dallas, Philly, Denver, Atlanta and other cities bUT they arent competitive. The hope is to get one or two noticed.

Other than the Native American players who excel on a few teams, most lax players are white.

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Ohio #80

“@northwesty, the situations just are not analogous. In one situation, the athletic department actually decides which kids to admit. In the other, the athletic department gets some amorphous level of slack from the admissions department.”

You say they are completely different. I say they are 100% analogous.

Athletes at all schools have to meet the standards for athletes established by the university administration. Period. Schools establish policies on how much they will relax the standards for athletes. And for URMs. And for legacies. And for kids whose family name appears on the library.

At some schools, the standard is just meeting the NCAA required minimum. At other schools the standards are higher.

All coaches at all schools are given a budget. Basically how much the admit standards can be relaxed for how many students. The football coach at Florida has more leeway than the football coach at Stanford. The Florida football coach likely also has more leeway than the Florida baseball or womens lacrosse coach. But they all have budgets and rules they have to meet.

In the Ivy League, for example, they have constructed a complex quantitative system for tracking what that budget is. It is not amorphous at all. Essentially, their AI system is an academic salary cap. The Ivy schools share information with each other to make sure that the other Ivies are not cheating.

The basic agreement is that the athletes at any single Ivy can’t vary in terms of their AI more than one standard deviation than the overall AI of the student enrollment at that Ivy. Then the coaches are given discretion in terms of how they allocate their admissions budget.

Star quarterbacks usually get a bigger break. O lineman typically have much higher AI stats. Some kids are recruited as high stat bench warmers in order to bring up the overall average. Some schools allocate more of their budget to particular focus teams – Princeton lacrosse, Yale ice hockey, Harvard basketball, Penn football. Fencing usually doesn’t get much admissions budget and usually doesn’t need it.

You really do protest too much. Especially since the schools themselves are quite up front about their policies in terms of how they favor athletes in admissions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/sports/before-athletic-recruiting-in-the-ivy-league-some-math.html?_r=0

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In sports where athletes have little chance or professionally playing the sport after college, a good portion of the top ranked HS athletes usually are stellar students, as many of the same personality characteristics that allow one to be top ranked in the sport also encourage excelling in the classroom. Such student athletes are often interested in attending schools with strong academics like Stanford, which assist with achieving their career goals. However, recruiting for sports like men’s basketball or football poses more of a challenge. Even if you do have some top football recruits who are decent enough students be academically successful at schools like Stanford, they often favor colleges that they believe will give them the best chance of making it to the NFL, rather than top USNWR type colleges.

While Stanford has had a lot of football success recently, historically it’s been one of the only sports where Stanford has a long history of not being particularly successful. For example, several years ago Stanford football had a 1-11 season, with talk of dropping out of Div I in the sport. The reasons for the unexpected success that began under Harbaugh are debatable. However, they at least include aggressive recruiting of the few top players who excel academically, as discussed at http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704364004576132503526250500 .

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To be certain, that 1-11 campaign, was almost 10 years ago. Ironically, one of there more under performing Stanford coaches was Buddy Teevans, the very affable and successful coach at Dartmouth (he has coached there twice).

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^^^thank you @Data10!
You put into words what I’ve been trying to say. The need to look at specific sports at specific schools. They are not all the same. My kid will never go “pro” in his sport because it doesn’t exist. Therefore academics have always trumped athletics. Period!

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@data10, agreed. I think there is a quantitative difference between the revenue sports and the non revenue sports. I was talking about Stanford’s ability to compete in football.

@northwesty, I am not protesting at all. I am just stating that based on personal experience, it is an apples and oranges comparison. They are simply two distinct systems.

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Ohio:

You view them as two distinct systems. That’s fine.

I view them as the same system, but with variations that match a particular school’s characteristics. Since in all cases we are talking about how a particular school relaxes admission requirements in order fill up its athletic team rosters.

Which is something schools don’t do for other student activities.

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@Ohiodad51, I know for certain that the admissions department at Northwestern has rejected football recruits that the coach wanted (who met the NCAA mininum as they ended up playing at other B10 schools). I also know that the average SAT scores of NU and Stanford football players are almost identical (and those 2 schools always lead FBS football programs in average SAT scores)*. Granted, at both schools, those test scores are far below the average for the student bodies as a whole.

*and at NU, the SAT score doesn’t even seem to be the most important criteria; a football player with a good GPA but a poor SAT has a better chance of getting the thumbs up than one who has a SAT comparable to the student body as a whole but a poor GPA.

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@boolaHI, to be sure, the Bakersfield girls probably got better coaching as I’d wager that In-and-Out guy knew more about soccer skills and soccer strategy than the coaches of the club soccer squad.

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Oh, no doubt. My point was more to the superfluous amenities of the other club team:two assistant coaches, more gear than São Paulo FC, etc…

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I wouldn’t expect SAT score to be the most important academic criteria. At least at Stanford GPA, course rigor, trends/grades on the full record (core GPA), and similar that are more correlated with academic success have a notable influence for athletic recruits. I expect a similar statement could be made at various other selective colleges. The policy seems to be working for them. Stanford football’s current GSR grad rate is 99%, which ties with Davidson as the highest among selective colleges. Northwestern is not far behind at 97%. The ivies range from 92% (Princeton and Cornell) to 98% (Brown).

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@purpletitan, I know a kid playing at Northwestern who scored below 20 on the ACT. I also know that Fitzgerald can and does guarantee admission to the school in no uncertain terms. Northwestern recruits my son’s program hard, and I know a handful of kids on the roster over the last few years, and a dozen or more who have been offered over the same time frame. I only know the one kid who seriously looked at Stanford, but I know that family pretty well. Based on that experience, all I can say is that the two programs operate differently, at least with respect to football recruiting in say the last five or six years.

@northwesty, isn’t the whole point of holistic admissions that schools give more or less weight to different attributes of each applicant and not just admit based on some formulaic interpretation of the numbers? I get how that is different than the situation of a recruit at Florida, or even in the Ivy League (because of the band system and likely letter process), but I don’t get how that is different than what I understand of athletic recruiting at places like Swarthmore.

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I’m pretty sure my daughter played that same Bakersfield team in at a tournament in Sweden this summer, so they must be getting support from somewhere.

I agree that we go overboard with youth sports, with parents convinced that if their child isn’t in an elite club at 8 they’ll never be a college recruit. The sad thing is that it’s becoming more and more true.