My point about Haverford was that top LACs really are all over the map in the degree to which they “have strong athletic cultures” in a competitive intercollegiate sense. Haverford and Swarthmore are perhaps at one extreme—being competitive in intercollegiate athletics is just not an institutional priority for them. Amherst and Williams are at the other extreme, perennial contenders in multiple sports in a highly competitive league, NESCAC. But apart from the NESCAC and Patriot League schools, how many top LACs are heavily invested in competitive intercollegiate sports? Not Swat. Not Haverford. So far as I know, none of the women’s colleges. So far as I know, not the Claremont Colleges. None of the top Midwestern LACs that I can think of.
We do have some athletically competitive LACs here in Minnesota, e.g., St. John’s which is a perennial national power in D-III football, but the most academically competitive LACs just aren’t up to that level of athletic competition. Carleton is the perennial doormat of the MIAC, the same league as St. John’s. Carleton’s football team is 0-8 this year in conference play and 1-9 overall, its lone victory a 27-12 thrashing of Macalester which competes in a weaker conference, the Midwest Conference. Macalester sports a pedestrian 4-6 football record, its only wins coming against Grinnell, Beloit, Lawrence, and Knox. So there you have pretty much all the top LACs academically in the Minnesota-Wisconsin-Iowa region, scraping the bottom of the barrel in intercollegiate athletic competition. Oh, and I almost left out St. Olaf which ranks just one notch above Carleton in the MIAC, its sole conference win coming against . . . (wait for it) . . . Carleton! Which pretty much defines a successful season for St. Olaf: if the Oles beat the crosstown rival Carls, it’s the pinnacle of athletic success for them. And vice versa. As for Oberlin, they’re so perennially non-competitive that their official school fight song pretty much centers around the line, “We’re Oberlin, we never win!”
These schools just don’t care that much about intercollegiate athletic competition. They field teams, but it’s viewed more as an EC for those who love the sport, not a point of institutional emphasis the way it is at Amherst, Williams, and perhaps the NESCAC schools more generally. But I don’t want to say these schools lack “strong athletic cultures” because many of them do take the old-fashioned idea of well-roundedness seriously; they’re into physical fitness and, yes, team sports, alongside academic excellence. But that just doesn’t translate into making intercollegiate athletic competition an institutional priority, and certainly not a priority in the admissions process.