Harvard Crimson op-ed on Athletic Recruiting

Athletic Recruits
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Obviously that depends on your value system.

Personally, I think participating in competitive team activities can be a great experience for kids, at least with good coaching and good peer leadership. And if you can combine that with physical fitness, even better. And if for some particular kid that means participating in niche sports, great.

I get concerned when kids start doing that in a way that seems to me to be putting a lot of pressure on themselves for the sport to be their ticket to a good college education. I get why it happens, but so many try and fail, and even when it works, I am not sure that was always really the best path for them in the long run. And I don’t think niche sports are an exception.

And then I understand why colleges recruit. We discussed it all above and in other threads, competing in these sports is integrated into their institutional strategies, including financial strategies. But understanding that doesn’t really change my concerns about how the possibility of being a recruited athlete is affecting the development of some of these kids, again including the ones who try but fail. And again I don’t think niche sports are an exception, particular not these days.

So personally, I have some deep reservations about the way recruited athletics works in practice, but I don’t have them any more about niche sports–nor any less.

As usual, I think when it comes to just the descriptive side of things, it is necessary to identify different kinds of diversity. Certainly some sports are not at all gender diverse, and some are very successfully co-ed. Sports can be more or less diverse ethnically or in terms of national origin, and different sports in different ways. Sports can be more or less diverse in terms of economic class. And so on.

I’m open minded to being proved wrong, but when I see the sorts of schools and individuals participating in, say, the squash national tournament, I see a lot of gender diversity, and I see a lot of at least some forms of ethnic and national origin diversity. But I am less sure I am seeing a lot of economic diversity. I am sure some, and it is not like these kids are walking around with family incomes sewn onto their uniforms. But purely based on the schools in question, I have some doubts it is a relatively economically diverse sport. In the US, at least–I admit I have no idea what it looks like in other countries.

But again, this observation is not meant to somehow suggest squash is a “bad sport”, or that it is bad for kids to like playing squash. But if we are asking the descriptive question of what squash recruiting might look like from the perspective of economic diversity? I think that is a valid descriptive question.

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That’s fair. Though I think the academic wiggle room is generally less than what people perceive, PARTICULARLY in said niche sports. Specially at HYPS etc…… and I don’t see anyone complaining about UT flying in the entire family of prospective recruits and putting them up at the Four Seasons.

And recruiting sucks. 100%. The vast majority of recruits are not Olympic hopefuls, even the ones that end up at T20s.

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I can’t answer for what other people perceive, but our feederish HS generates a lot of recruited athletes in niche sports, and we are definitely placing people in Ivies and NESCACs and UAAs and such who very likely would not have gotten admitted based on their numbers. To be sure, these kids are still good students, well-prepared for a selective college, and indeed it is obvious to get through a pre-read they need good GPAs and usually good test scores. But it is also pretty obvious our unhooked kids usually need materially more rare GPA/scores to be competitive for the same colleges.

Which I don’t actually have a problem with, to be clear. But I do think it happens, and it is part of why some families have spent many years and a lot of money supporting year-round travel club and summer programs and such. It is in fact sometimes a path to getting into Harvard or Carnegie Mellon or Middlebury or whatever that may not have existed otherwise.

For the record, I have a relatively low level of concern about all this as it applies to these colleges (Ivies and NESCACs and UAAs and such). I do wonder sometimes if all these kids really wanted to be spending all that time devoted to their recruited sport, but some of them very clearly loved it anyway. And although I also have some concerns about whether they will always get the best possible college experience if they stick with it, I am not concerned about things like whether they will actually get a good education and a good degree.

The big money sports at the big public D1s is a whole other thing. Not always, but sometimes those kids really are not prepared for their college, sometimes they are pressured into not so great academic paths, and too often they don’t actually get a degree. That’s a true scandal. In comparison, this other stuff is a much milder issue, at least to me.

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Well, you could say the same about the piano or violin. Or the 90% of my Ds 3rd grade classmates who went to Kumon, or Russian Math or AoPS. Honestly, I’ve met a lot more people who resent their parents for those activities, than for sports.

FWIW, my kids are “academic kids,” not athletic kids.

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Yeah, the kids who are playing in college have to be self-motivated. Parental pressure on a kid who’s heart isn’t in their sport will not be very successful at recruiting. Because they won’t be at a high enough level. It takes 110% effort, not 80 or 90%.

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I’m also not a fan of kids participating in a sport (or any activity) because they think it’ll improve their admission chances at a particular set of schools.

But I don’t see that happening with the athletes that are truly recruitable. They are pursuing the sport because they’re passionate about it.

Then, when college comes around they’re making pragmatic decisions about athletic and academic fit.

For most of the Ivy-level athletes I know, Ivies were among several good options, not necessarily the sort of “dream school” that they were desperate to attend from birth.

I have less experience with NESCAC and UAA athletes but I assume they have a similar approach.

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And I have! Again, if the kid loves it, great. If they are doing it because of family pressure because it would be good for college admissions, I have concerns.

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Yeah, I am actually with you and cinnamon1212 on this. The ones I know who were actually recruited pretty much all seem to truly love their sport.

But I know of other cases where the kid was doing club and such from way before high school, and then eventually in HS they either never developed to that level, or maybe they flat out rebelled and told their parents they had enough of that. Some might have continued on with just in-season school in their sport, but they stopped the expensive and time-consuming year-round stuff. This includes a couple kids I know who were in fact at least D3 recruitable, and being recruited, as of end of junior year, but they decided to opt out for actual college applications.

And I completely agree it is not at all limited to sports. We could well be talking about certain activities or academic tracks where the kid and family poured in a lot of time and resources over many years and yet for whatever reason it ended up not being what they originally were aiming for in terms of college admissions.

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We try to encourage our kids to do whatever they choose to do with commitment and genuine effort. I don’t really care about the outcome. An A- because HW was missed is unacceptable. Being the slowest on the team but showing up to every practice? I’ll be cheering you all the way.

Chance me threads are full of sad examples of catered lives (most of which don’t involve sports).

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If you mean how many teams are funded by Alabama football (men’s and women’s teams) then you are right, a lot. If you are comparing the number of niche sports, then Alabama is no different than any of the big D1 schools. Texas has 20. Alabama has 21. Stanford is an exception with 36 teams. Harvard has 42. Williams has 32.

A sport like golf is represented at a lot of schools, but another like lacrosse isn’t as common in the west (women’s is growing faster than men’s). It’s very common at all the Ivies, east coast elites like Duke, Hopkins, UNC, Penn State.

If the school doesn’t have a large endowment and doesn’t have a football team bringing in the big bucks like Texas or Alabama, they have to find a way to fund those extra teams before adding them, so may not be able add squash or sailing or skiing. Harvard doesn’t have to worry about funding so can add any sport they want to.

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I wasn’t calling out Alabama specifically, but yeah UT is no better. All these schools have cut men’s teams because of football. And yeah, plenty of academically unprepared athletes getting in over qualified students. In any case, by point is why do we keep harping on Harvard and squash?

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Exactly.

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^This^

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Because people think Harvard is letting in a huge percentage of students has recruited athletes. Texas has 1000(?) athletes, not all on scholarship and many who would have been admitted anyway (although may have gotten the thumb on the scale), but if Harvard admits 200 athletes per year, that’s not fair.

I think people should be happy about the athletic recruits at Harvard, Northwestern, Duke, even U of Chicago. It keeps the admissions pool in the achievable range for the very good but not perfect applicant. If the schools didn’t have different types of admits (athletes, talents like art or music, economic diversity) those schools would become a numbers only game and, IMO, pretty boring.

I found the best part of college to be meeting and studying with all kinds of people, not just those who were perfect academically.

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Do you make room for the idea that because many elite schools (ivys/nescac) do not offer athletic scholarships, many talented but non-wealthy athletes “follow the money” and self select out of the recruiting process?

This is an issue for both niche and what many of you think of as normal sports.

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Non-wealthy students may qualify for need based aid, so could use the recruiting slop for admissions and the ‘non-wealthy’ part to qualify for need based aid, thus perhaps getting the same amount (or probably more)of aid to attend an Ivy as taking an athletic scholarship at another school. That of course assumes another school even gives athletic scholarships for the niche sport.

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Sure, although usually Ivy, NESCAC, and UAA colleges have generous need aid. But full pay families and such very much have less financial incentive to try to be recruited by Ivies and D3s.

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Yeah, logically Ivies would be in most trouble with full pay athletes against other highly regarded D1s that would offer them athletic scholarships.

But if those scholarships have very limited availability anyway, not so much.

This presumably is part of the explanation for in which sports Ivies are competitive for national championships, or not so much.

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Well in the case of this thread, it is probably because it stemmed froma Harvard Crimson editorial. In general, I think it is because Harvard gets harped upon in many threads (occasionally displaced by the harping on MIT and Caltech when posters want to discuss STEM fields).

Why squash in particular, I dunno. Do people harp more on squash than other niche sports say water polo or horseback riding? I hadn’t noticed, but I also don’t pay much attention to the threads about sports recruiting. Anyway, I don’t think it is some sort of insult to acknowledge that there are socioeconomic and demographic differences in the players who train for different sports. As I understand it, for most (all?) sports, $$$, time, and talent are required for a student to become good enough to be a recruited athlete. Some sports probably skew wealthier than others, but they all require resources. Personally, I don’t have any problems with that. And if most squash players are pretty wealthy so what? Money buys access to a lot of benefits that those without money can’t access.

If I have any objections to the relationship between money and athletic opportunities, they are the same objections that I have with the relationship between money and other opportunities that help in college admissions. Some students and parents seem to think that their accomplishments are self-made and due just to their own hard work and talent (with a dollop of superb parenting thrown in) while failing to acknowledge or even notice the role that money played in giving the student certain opportunities in the first place. I find that perspective strange probably because there is no question in my mind that my kids’ accomplishments are built on the strength of their K-12 schools and teachers as well as their good fortune to have an educated parent. Mine are already so far ahead of the game compared to some of their friends and cousins who have not had the same opportunities that they’ve had that I would be frustrated with my kids if they didn’t realize their privilege. I do call them out when they seem to be talking in an entitled manner. While it is none of my business, I also get frustrated with entitlement from other people in the discussion of all facets of college admissions.

ETA: None of the above is meant to disparage the talent and hard work of successful athletes. It is possible to admire that talent, praise the dedication, and still be aware of the role that money played in helping them achieved their potential.

If the student athlete isn’t wealthy, wouldn’t they qualify for need-based aid at most ivy and nescac schools? Obviously they would have to get in first, but I thought that was the point of hoping to be recruited.

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Yes and the plus of need based aid for an athlete is they can stop and still remain at the school. I have heard many stories about students with athletic money not being able to quit their sport, as they could no longer afford the school and graduate. We live near a big D1 school and our dr friends have told us over and over again how bad they feel for the athletes they treat for both physical and mental concerns that want to be done with their sport, issues with coach or team, family pressure etc
and feel stuck as they need the scholarship.
Personally, way more respect for schools not providing athletic $ - just my opinion.

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