Yes, I think club (and niche) sports like ultimate and rugby are helpful at schools that take those sports seriously. Carleton is one example (and I know outstanding students who applied to Carleton just because of the ultimate program); Brown is another. The Brown ultimate coach will write to Admissions on behalf of select ultimate players who attend their fall “recruiting” weekend. To be clear, there is no official recruiting program, and the coach has no “slots.” But presumably that coach outreach to admissions is a plus on the applications of otherwise qualified students. (I believe Brown has a more formal recruiting program for rugby, also a club sport.)
ETA: UT-Austin is another one, oddly enough. In fact, they offer scholarships to some ultimate athletes. I know of at least two OOS students who received this offer. This is very unusual, especially at large schools that are in high demand; I assume there’s some money from alumni interested in building the program behind the scholarships.
CU Boulder, an ultimate powerhouse, does not offer anything like this. Nor do Michigan, Georgia Tech, Pitt, UCLA, Berkeley, Oregon, UMass, UDub—big schools with strong ultimate programs that my kid or friends have experience with.
ETA again lol: If your kid is a club-level athlete, don’t overlook the network that creates. My kid engaged with the ultimate team at many of the schools he applied to. He visited/played with the teams he was most interested in, got to know other kids, and was able to ask them questions about the school that informed his applications. So while he didn’t get the advantage of a formal recruiting program for admissions, he did get insight that had to have made his applications better. And then he entered his freshman year with a built-in set of connections and an immediate activity to get involved with.
agree I think that can happen at those smaller LACs, the question is if AOs actually prioritize them. I honestly have ZERO clue… . It may be they keep an eye out for certain sports more than others that have bigger rosters? Or certain years when rosters are lighter? Or for sports that have higher drop-out rates? Or maybe it is for all their sports…
It’s geography and topography. The pancake-flat Minnesota landscape is a natural advantage to any frisbee-related sport. Like the warm weather advantage for baseball.
I’d agree trying to do serious HS sports just to pad your college applications is very likely a mistake.
As I see it, the more practical question is if you actually have some natural talent and then love one or more sports, should you dump them anyway to gain more time to use for more “efficient” activities?
I would personally say no, both because I don’t think everything you do in HS should be about marginal college admissions advantages, but also because I think most things you’d be doing instead probably are not really going to end up much more impactful. Maybe if you were super talented at something else and you have to choose, but generally I think some people overestimate how much the type of EC actually matters to highly selective colleges.
And to the extent it does, ECs that just, say, show you are smart, ambitious, and hardworking are not necessarily really adding much to a transcript and recommendations that already say the same thing. So when you think about ECs that actually add a fresh dimension to your application, very few are “efficient”, because in fact doing something meaningful on a new dimension is rarely a small undertaking.
So, sports, arts, volunteering, any of that sort of thing may seem inefficient in comparison to just, say, signing up for some academicky competitions. But in a way, the true added value is sort of related to the inefficiency.
I think it does for many schools. My son was an all-state runner, all-conference, all-league, 2 year captain, etc. He was recruited by a ton of schools but not here he ultimately wanted to go (UCLA).
I think schools were impressed that he worked hard and achieved very highly at something. I think you can show that in a lot of ways, including sports.