My recollection is that the official Ivy League swim champions were crowned from dual-meet records up until the early to mid 1990s (I am guessing 93?). The Eastern meet served as an end of season, trials and finals meet for the Ivy League, but was also attended by lots of schools. At some point, the Ivy League switched from having their champion come from dual meet records to the conference meet, at which point they started their own championship meet.
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Bear in mind a couple things: As mentioned, the travel can be significant, and a strain on academics. I have two siblings who walked on to D3 tennis, made it, were playing, and both quit because they were missing too much class. Those matches were primarily within Western NY State. Midweek games can be time-consuming, even if the drive is only an hour.
The Patriot League is unlike most Division 1 leagues in that they still seem to maintain a realm of sensibility when it comes to academics. I have a relative who was a walk-on and competed in a sport with few scholarships, but canât speak for soccer (an advantage of the Patriot League is that even though they are Division 1, the core/anchor schools that have all or almost all teams in the league (Bucknell, Lafayette, Colgate, Lehigh and Holy Cross) are small and canât fill up a class of 500 or 600 with 200 athletes, so there is room for walk-ons). That person didnât seem to have it get in the way of academics. By the same token, you still have to ensure that travel will not get in the way of schoolinâ, especially labs. Weekends and Friday travel are usually tolerable.
I donât know if your child will be a scholarship candidate, but check to see who controls academics if the student gets a Patriot League scholarship. At most Division 1 schools, scholarships come with study halls and at least having the schoolâs academic advisor sign off on the schedule. I would find out how much control the coach/athletic department will have over academics (If anyone can post regarding this, Iâd like to know).
Having been in the Ivy League (non-scholarship, of course), had a coach dared try to tell a student what courses to take, the coach would have gotten an explosion from the student, and the coaches never were sent any academic info once the student enrolled. But the coach couldnât take away a scholarship or threaten to do so.
I would guess that NESCAC is the same when it comes to coaches not being involved in academic advising.
The level of competition is going to be significantly different. A Williams coach told one of my friendâs sons that their school is where those who are academically-qualified to get into the Ivy League but arenât good enough to play in the Ivy League wind up. That could also be true for the Patriot League - that was the case before they added scholarships. There will be a significant gap between Patriot League and NESCAC sports. When Division 1 schools play a Division 3 basketball school midseason as a post-exam âpracticeâ game, they are inherently blowouts.
Academically, I think these schools are all roughly equivalent (and I know this may create a firestorm, but I went to an Ivy League school and had a child go to a NESCAC school, plus had a cousin of my child go to a Patriot League school), so the best advice I would give a nextdoor neighbor is to go to the school where they have the best chance to play and like the best, if money difference is not a factor.
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In case you get confused when you dig around the history of the Patriot League, it ws originally called the Colonial League, and changed its name to Patriot League after a few years.
It is now a long-established league.
I think for the majority of sports, the NESCAC teams have a better chance at getting to a National Championship game than Patriot League schools do. At least they probably go much deeper into the NCAA playoffs.
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True. The menâs DIII Basketball Final Four included both Trinity and Wesleyan (who were #1 ranked much of the season and going into the Tournament). Trinity beat Wesleyan in the semi (second time that season and only team to beat WesU all year) and NYU in the final.
Although I donât doubt that thereâs truth to your statement that Patriot League teams have a significantly different level of competition than NESCAC, I think itâs probably sport dependent. For this original poster for soccer (a sport I donât know well) I have no reason to doubt you. But for future students/parents, do some research re: whatever your sport is to confirm that this is the case as it relates to you. As a XC/Track parent, I can say this statement does not generally hold true. Some NESCAC teams will easily beat some Patriot League teams in mixed Division meets, most will be about the same, and some PL will handily beat some NESCAC. So, just be aware of your sport when considering the generalization that PL is substantially more athletically dominant than NESCAC.
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Absolutely accurate, although more for womenâs sports than menâs.
The NESCAC is much, much more successful, in terms of an NCAA tournament showing, than the Patriot League in menâs soccer.
No idea if a top NESCAC team would beat a Patriot League one though.
If you look at computerized rankings like Massey the top NESCAC schools typically rank higher than the bottom Patriot Leagues schools (and in some sports the bottom Ivy League schools as well). That wouldnât make me say that they are necessarily better but Iâm sure that they are competitive with these schools in many sports.
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Although I had some intuition, I used the power point scores from swim swam (championship version) to rank the schools in the Ivy League, Patriot League, and NESCAC for swimming. Some caveats are that these scores do not account for diving, nor squad size limits for championship results. It would be interesting to see how well they correlated with the actual conference meet results, but offhand I noticed the scores have Yale ahead of Harvard. Harvard beat Yale at Heps (although Yale scored more at Nationals).
Here are the menâs scores.
Princeton (Ivy) 789.37
Yale (Ivy) 782.63
Harvard (Ivy) 782.05
Army (Patriot) 769.88
Cornell (Ivy) 767.74
Navy (Patriot) 762.20
Brown (Ivy) 760.95
Columbia (Ivy) 756.88
Penn (Ivy) 743.77
Loyola (Patriot) 740.98
Bucknell (Patriot) 702.27
Dartmouth (Ivy) 696.00
Tufts (NESCAC) 685.30
Wiliams (NESCAC) 681.93
BU (Patriot) 674.55
Amherst (NESCAC) 650.25
Lehigh (Patriot) 647.55
Bates (NESCAC) 635.19
Colgate (Patriot) 628.48
Holy Cross (Patriot) 627.72
Connecticut College (NESCAC) 627.00
Middlebury (NESCAC) 625.51
American (Patriot) 616.63
Bowdoin (NESCAC) 613.56
Hamilton (NESCAC) 606.67
Lafayette (Patriot) 606.52
Colby (NESCAC) 567.93
Wesleyan (NESCAC) 542.42
Trinity (NESCAC) 524.21
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And here are the womenâs scores
Princeton (Ivy) 730.71
Brown (Ivy) 728.88
Penn (Ivy) 727.93
Harvard (Ivy) 720.08
Yale (Ivy) 718.69
Navy (Patriot) 700.07
Columbia (Ivy) 694.86
Army (Patriot) 693.18
Cornell (Ivy) 672.92
Loyola (Patriot) 668.19
Williams (NESCAC) 663.72
Bucknell (Patriot) 663.85
Tufts (NESCAC) 655.42
Dartmouth (Ivy) 653.22
American (Patriot) 642.67
BU (Patriot) 641.34
Colgate (Patriot) 633.72
Lehigh (Patriot) 625.48
Middlebury (NESCAC) 608.76
Colby (NESCAC) 605.88
Lafayette (Patriot) 596.97
Holy Cross (Patriot) 590.21
Hamilton (NESCAC) 578.85
Bowdoin (NESCAC) 577.02
Connecticut College (NESCAC) 576.11
Amherst (NESCAC) 573.42
Bates (NESCAC) 553.74
Wesleyan (NESCAC) 541.19
Trinity (NESCAC) 536.50
Props to all 3 conferences for such good representation in both menâs and womenâs swimming!
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Good point. I was extrapolating from football and menâs basketball, and that probably doesnât hold for all sports in the Patriot League. Iâm not even sure where Georgetown fits into the league in football, because they have no football scholarships.
I never have figured how these small schools have been able to fill such a large battery of teams. Best is to try to determine the caliber of play for the sport involved - in this case, soccer - if you can, as there isnât really enough interdivisional play to get much of a comparison.
Donât include scrimmages or JV games for comparison, because they are not really reflective of game play.. Even a Division 1, Division 3 in-season basketball game is hard to use as a comparison, because the Division 1 teams treat these as practice games, where all the players, including many JV team players play, and the leading scorer usually turns out to be a player who has never seen game time before.
But there could be some way to determine the comparative caliber of the soccer program for a given school. My belief is that athletes should usually choose the best academic school where they can still play.
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Here is my analysis across the 3 leagues for menâs cross country (like golf, a low score in cross country is good!). I donât know of a site that allows 1 to 1 ranking across divisions easily, so I developed my own approach. This took more work, and more assumptions, but for the most part this looks ok to me. I will follow up with a brief description of methodology and some of the assumptions and limitations in a reply.
| rank | school | points |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Princeton | 51 |
| 2 | Harvard | 72 |
| 3 | Cornell | 97 |
| 4 | Penn | 152 |
| 5 | Navy | 174 |
| 6 | Yale | 195 |
| 7 | BU | 223 |
| 8 | Army | 230 |
| 9 | Dartmouth | 242 |
| 10 | Tufts | 296 |
| 11 | Bucknell | 308 |
| 12 | Lehigh | 324 |
| 13 | Columbia | 336 |
| 14 | Williams | 337 |
| 15 | Holy Cross | 361 |
| 16 | Middlebury | 385 |
| 17 | Amherst | 404 |
| 18 | Brown | 416 |
| 19 | Wesleyan | 427 |
| 20 | Bates | 460 |
| 21 | American | 465 |
| 22 | Colby | 482 |
| 23 | Bodoin | 489 |
| 24 | Colgate | 534 |
| 25 | Connecticut College | 546 |
| 26 | Trinity | 599 |
| 27 | Lafayette | 601 |
| 28 | Hamilton | 664 |
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Cross country races are on grass, and even if the distance is the same, some courses are much hillier, muddier, etc. than others. You really canât compare times, even across two races on the same course on the same day. So I looked up track times from Spring 2025, ranked them, and ran a virtual (modified) cross country race.
I found 5K times from tfrrs for spring 2025 outdoor track. If a school didnât have 7 5k times, or if the 5th 5K time was significantly slower than the 4th, I checked for 1500 times as well. I used a Jack Danielâs VDOT calculator to convert the 1500 times to 5K, and then identified the top 5 times for each school. Loyola has cross country, but not outdoor track for men, so they didnât get counted.
Then I sorted the times for all 140 runners across 28 teams, and each team was scored the sum of their 5 placesâjust like a cross country meet, except I chose not to include 6 and 7 runners for displacement. It just made the calculations quicker this way.
Some caveats:
I wanât really strict about whether to count 1500 times or not. There might be some runners I missed. However, there are some really good 1500 runners who are only so so cross country runners, so this starts to get tricky to handle. I also completely ignored 10K times, thinking most good 10K runners would run a 5K at some point in the season.
There are a few teams who had a strong runner who didnât run outdoor. (at least two of the Ivy League teams were missing their top XC runner in outdoor). I made no attempt to account for this.
A funny thing about cross country meets is that displacement from other teams matters. This can be especially important when a lower team happens to have a single runner who scores very well. As a result, particularly fast runners from NESCAC schools could help their teams in this âcombined meetâ much more than they would in a meet with just the NESCAC schools.
Still, I think this captures the relative strength of the three conferences pretty well. Once agian, hats off to all three conferences for such good representation!
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Kudos on the analysis. I could quibble with the fact that there are are XC guys who arenât as good on the track (and so the 5K may not be the ideal proxy), but you pretty much hit the finishing team order for the Heps spot on. Well done.
Thanks for giving this a go.
extremely well done Lurker Joe -
And here are the womenâs cross country scores from my simulated tri-conference meet.
| Rank | School | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Princeton | 55 |
| 2 | Harvard | 69 |
| 3 | Army | 121 |
| 4 | Yale | 150 |
| 5 | BU | 157 |
| 6 | Dartmouth | 169 |
| 7 | Penn | 170 |
| 8 | Cornell | 173 |
| 9 | Brown | 195 |
| 10 | Navy | 235 |
| 11 | Columbia | 251 |
| 12 | Lehigh | 306 |
| 13 | Williams | 332 |
| 14 | Bucknell | 346 |
| 15 | Amherst | 354 |
| 16 | Connecticut College | 386 |
| 17 | Holy Cross | 406 |
| 18 | Middlebury | 417 |
| 19 | Tufts | 484 |
| 20 | Bates | 516 |
| 21 | Wesleyan | 517 |
| 22 | Lafayette | 530 |
| 23 | American | 543 |
| 24 | Hamilton | 552 |
| 25 | Colgate | 585 |
| 26 | Loyola | 629 |
| 27 | Colby | 639 |
| 28 | Trinity | 648 |
| 29 | Bowdoin | 650 |
I was more careful to look at the 1500, 5000, and 10000 times than I was for the menâs analysis. I ignored the steeple chase, as it is very hard to convert to a flat track time. I used the same methodology to simulate all three conference meets, and checked my resultsâpretty good, I thought. There was one team that I felt was significantly higher in my simulation than in the actual conference meet. When I looked over the times from individual runners for that team, they had at least two runners who were much better during track than they were at the XC conference meet. Could be they were sick or injured at the XC conference meet, they just took a big step during track, or they just arenât as good at XC as they are on the track.
All four analyses showed what I thought they wouldâa pretty clear ranking of the conferences overall, but overlap between the individual teams in different conferences.
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any weighting to the perceived quality of the incoming frosh - especially given the roster limit issues, there will be something of a waterfall impact on all of these schools -
tough to dimension that impact Iâm sure