^^^ But no one can argue that those lacrosse players at Duke weren’t involved in a really sleazy party culture because they definitely were. It’s just that they were not guilty of the crimes they were charged with. Plenty of underage drinking and hiring strippers; I can certainly see why people found the charges believable. I live in an area where lacrosse is very popular, particularly with the prep school crowd and believe me, I’ve never known a lacrosse player whose family wasn’t financially well off. It’s an expensive sport to play. In addition, the terrible murder of Yeardly Love by George Huguely at UVA was in a pretty toxic lacrosse culture and that certainly didn’t help either lacrosse’s or UVAs image.
Of course most college lacrosse players are probably no worse than players of any other varsity sport but I can certainly understand a young woman wanting to avoid them. It was common when my daughter was in high school at a local private girls school for the older girls to warn the younger ones away from the male lacrosse players at the boys schools. That reputation exists for a reason.
Hi, i’m @twoinanddone , the poor parent of a college lax player. Nice to meet you.
There are outreach programs to bring lacrosse to poorer neighborhoods in the US and abroad. Citylax in Denver was one of the earliest ones, and there are programs in Philly, NY (long Island), Dallas. There was a documentary about Citylax, about how some east coasters moved to Denver and wanted to teach the sport to inner city kids. All equipment, fields, refs, coaches were provided and continue to be provided. In the beginning, the organizers called all their friends and said “Send me your old equipment, show up on Sat to help. Come paint the fields for us.” Then they wrote grants to US Lax to fund the programs and supply equipment.
It is a whole lot more middle class than it was. Sure, the kids playing in the Little League World Series of Lax are still named Rockefeller (literally), but it’s true in almost any sport that those on the best teams are wealthy and have had more opportunities than others. The Little League baseball teams that travel are almost all from wealthy suburbs, have parents who are professional athletes and can afford to travel to good competition.
Lax Bro’s, and basketball players, aren’t a protected class so she can discriminate all she wants against them. She’s just cutting out a lot of really good schools by having this as a requirement.
I do find it very judgmental to rule out schools just because he/she saw a person she thought she might not like. “my other kid nearly refused to get out of the car because of the cocky swagger, complete with long, blond, flow, on display as we pulled up to his overnight visit.”
I just can’t imagine how boring it must be to go to a school where everyone is exactly the same and you are never exposed to any other lifestyles or views.
Jocks are jocks, some just hit or carry or throw different targets, just like Nerds are nerds, some just read or study or otherwise engage in different subjects lol. The “bro” mentality is more than playing a sport or studying hard, its more of an “in-your-face, can’t touch me now” attitude and has a definite arrogance bent.
@twoinanddone Well, it was very frustrating for me, but he did his overnight and, on balance, preferred Oberlin to Grinnell. But at the end of the day, he wanted big, so went to an OOS flagship, had a phenomenal experience, and is successfully launched.
And for slightly nerdy kids who may have been mocked for not being athletic enough or preppy enough or something else, finding a college community where they are not surrounded by the vision of their high school tormentors seems like a reasonable preference.
There has to be some criteria for finding a way to eliminate the mind-boggling number of colleges. If OPs daughter chooses to eliminate based on lax bros, who cares? From the start, my D axed any colleges in southern states, particualrly in Texas. I got some flack for that on a thread I created about her college search.
All kids have to find a way to start eliminating. My son doesn’t want any school that doesn’t have a lot of school spirit. That means he won’t be applying to Reed College or Brandeis. They like what they like, and they have to start somewhere.
@Lindagaf I agree! Especially after you get down to type, size, and location they all start to look the same. For my D, she had more than a dozen LACs, nearly all in the Northeast, most less than 3000 and all within the top 50. We started looking at study abroad programs, dining, dorm rooms/apartments, types of students (nerds, jocks, artsy, eccentric) including race and demographic diversity…anything to get the list scaled down. One thing I think some people forget to do is check the course listings and previous schedules for students…no one wants to get to mid-junior and find out they have to take a class over the summer because its a requirement.
That is exactly the attitude that caused my daughter to dismiss a school. Smith. But she visited before making the judgment and she didn’t then jump to all women’s colleges are like that.
Honest question those offended by “lax bro culture”… How should my D begin to narrow the schools to visit if she doesn’t want a specific culture (regardless of what the culture is)?
She can find schools she does like, but recognize that a lot of fine schools will be off the list because they have ‘that culture’ (or in some cases, the reputation for the culture so you don’t even look at them). People do it all the time with eliminating big sports, religion, size, drug culture, diversity, location, etc. A lot of people eliminated schools in states with recreational marijuana, but now that the number of states that allow it is growing, so is the number of schools left off the lists.
“Honest question those offended by “lax bro culture”… How should my D begin to narrow the schools to visit if she doesn’t want a specific culture (regardless of what the culture is)?”
It’s a bit like finding a house and reading what the real estate agents say… you have to know the code, a bit. Like ‘cozy’ means small and ‘potential’ means needs work, etc. So if your D wants to avoid a school where everyone plays D and D and is into manga and that’s about it she might want to avoid ‘quirky student body’ and if she wants to avoid places dominated by Greek life you can actually see the stats for percentage of students in fraternities and sororities in various places like the Princeton guide. There’s a website called unigo that has student reviews where students have answered polls about things like alcohol use or how often they get into intellectual discussions outside of the classroom or how big sports are, that kind of thing. Also the Princeton guidebook has top 20 and bottom 20 lists for importance of sports culture, drug use, environmentalism, etc.
She might want to avoid schools that have D1 sports, Greek life, and D3 schools in competitive sports conferences (nescac) where more than 40% of students are athletes. She will probably toss out a few lovely babies with that bath water though.
My guess is that the schools that are left will be more urban and/or have more of an alternative vibe. Bard, Guilford, Reed, Haverford, Macalester, Swat?
Honestly, for me, this would be more about dominant culture rather than the existence of the group at all. Rural schools tend to be isolated aND as a result, to form culture and community than is less influenced by the outside than urban schools. So what is that culture and who is creating it? Is it frats? Jocks? Theater kids? Social justice warriors? Nerds?
I was a very active LAX mom, helped shepherd it from club to fully funded varsity sport at my kids’ high school. My D, a lax sis for 7 years, is not fond of her male counterparts’ cultural rep.
That said, while there certainly are lax bros at her college, she doesn’t remark upon their presence one way or the other and they aren’t the only male sports team there with a “party hard/entitled-rich-kid/all live together/head to Wall St as a group” thing going on.
@awayhegoes I’ve seen a lot of threads on CC looking for the presence or absence of plenty of stereotypes - SJW, gay, nerdy, party, whatever. I haven’t seen any threads where kids say they don’t want to be around a lot of non-white people but I think the number of white applicants who don’t consider HBCUs or even some UCs likely speaks to that.
Circling back to clarify my comment about guy with “flow” at Grinnell – my point was that kids can make snap judgments based on seemingly random encounters. Few would describe Grinnell as a “lax bro” kind of place and yet, when my kid saw the equivalent of an Abercrombie model as he was preparing to get out for his overnight, all he could see was the guys who were jackasses to him in high school. The challenge for students is to filter, appropriately, for the random incident which does not reflect the character or nature of the community. One might see the random “lax bro” anywhere but that does not mean that is the culture of the school.
Yes, that can be a situation where a visit may give information that is of negative value, because a chance superficial encounter (whether good or bad) is not representative of the school. If the student and parents know what they want to look for beforehand, and realize that chance superficial encounters may not necessarily be representative, they may get much more value out of a visit than otherwise.
@rightcoaster - In the Boston area, MIT has the largest percentage of students who belong to fraternities. I would not assume that it is free of the 'bro culture.
Judging from this and other discussions, it would be helpful if colleges would publish their statistics on how many Lax Bros , surfer dudes, tennis divas, muscleheads, frisbee nerds, hipsters, & preppies they have.