Walk-ons at Yale: they need you!

Schokolade
Thu, 10 Mar 2011 11:55:07 +0000

As various people have pointed out, whether a student who played a varsity sport for four years is a good candidate for being a walk-on in college depends on the sport.

Of course, a college would want a football player to have played for his school; to my knowledge, there’s no such thing as club football, so school is it. As klu375 said, in tennis, many of the best players are home-schooled so they’ll have more time to train. Some of the very best tennis players don’t play on their school teams because they are so far ahead of the other players that they’d get little real training during practice, and only USTA tournaments matter much for college recruiting. (My son, who is good but not great, goes to varsity tennis practice, then from there to his year-round club training, every day.)

I have heard that some coaches of elite players in some sports forbid their club players to play the sport at school because the risk of injury is greater than the potential benefit to the player. I don’t know how common this is.