Nearly all of the travel sports obsessed kids who were “recruited” for college seem to quit?
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Anonymous
Honey, you need to stop day drinking. |
Anonymous
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Mine is at Williams in her senior year. Her sport has been a fantastic experience and she’s getting a great education. Maybe she would’ve gotten into the school without it but I’m happy she didn’t have to roll those dice. It was also nice to hit campus with a built-in friend group, which endured. She’s worked hard in class and is heading to grad school next year. Playing wasn’t always easy and she did get hurt and miss part of one season, but on balance it was great for her and it gave us a connection to the place we haven’t felt with our other kids’ schools. We’ll miss watching her games but not the horrible drives. You know it’s bad when you’re excited that it’s *only* a five hour slog. And the home games, yeesh.
Sorry to all the posters for whom sports didn’t work out very well, and I do think that we focus on sports a little too much in this country. I remember many holiday weekends ruined because of this tournament or that. But my daughter always loved playing and we weren’t about to stop her, even if it had led to a different outcome. About half of her travel team played in college. I don’t recall any of those who quit, though one blew an ACL and it ended early. |
Anonymous
I'm now deeply skeptical of this claim because I have seen three supposedly "verbal offered" Ivy League kids in 9th and 10th grade... but then they ended up at tailgate states. Doesn't make any logical sense, especially since the kids are all from elite k-12 private netorks. I think the parents and kid boast about "Ivy League offers" that aren't actually genuine offers. |
Anonymous
This thread obviously is not about student-athlete kids attending an elite college like Williams. 
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Anonymous
Uh, yeah. Or it was ivy at nearly full cost. |
Anonymous
Sure it is. You just don’t like it because it doesn’t fit your narrative. |
Anonymous
+1 |
Anonymous
Ok, but you are talking about kids you happen to know from your kid’s school and extrapolating from that, right? Are any of them starters on Maryland, Wake Forest, or other great soccer schools? Were any of them DA stars or star players for a soccer powerhouse private (in our area this typically means Baltimore). Any of them have youth national team call ups? In the DC area and other areas where soccer is huge, like the NY/NJ metro areas and Southern California, there are going to be a fair number of boys who are deciding whether to roll the dice on a pro career after HS, vs. picking the best soccer school vs. picking an Ivy or similar top academic school that will almost certainly mean the end of a kid’s pro dreams. These are the type of kids I’m talking about in the post above. |
Anonymous
| ^^ They’re all in my middle daughter’s orbit - different sports, but same MO with girls claiming to have a specific Ivy offer or commitment early in high school. Then by senior year it’s oh by the way I’m actually going to a place like Pitt or UMBC or Gettysburg... if not even more obscure. |
Anonymous
This thread is very clearly about sports crazy families whose kids end up at obscure and/or unimpressive colleges. |
Anonymous
No. This thread is about a OP believing no kids actually end up at Williams. She believes every single kid either burns out or ends up at a Podunk college. Our experiences that most of the really good players use sports to get into a really great college. |
Anonymous
I have certainly seen it happen where kids/families either misconstrue how firm an offer from a given school is, or are overly optimistic about their ability to meet the academic minimums the coach lays out. Even serious players with solid offers frequently fail to get the test scores needed for a coach to get them through admissions, or they have a disastrous semester and the coach moves down the list for a surer bet. But what I’m talking about are kids who pass the pre-read at top NESCACs but opt for a good D1 school with a strong soccer team, or a kid with a solid offer at Yale who in the end chooses Wake or UVA. |
Anonymous
Has your son/daughter gone through the recruiting process? What you may not know is the financial picture of the family. Ivy league schools do not offer sports scholarships, only need based aid. At the end of the day, $50-70K per year (depending on your monetary award for need) for the Ivy League name is hard to swallow. That no name school may have offered a better financial package. Many families also have multiple children to send to college. Can they afford to send thier student athletes? Also, those superstar athletes in high school? Their academic stats may be on the low end of average. Who doesn’t mind that? The D1 tailgate programs, plenty of D2 programs, and those “no name” D3 schools. Their academic standards are very flexible compared to the high academic schools. Ivy League schools have a band system where they really do need most of the team to have pretty decent stats. Every student’s situation is different. You do you. Good luck! |
Anonymous
| Sports crazy parents can’t admit defeat after ten years of all their summers, weekends and nights burned — their ego needs their kid to “play at the next level.” Non-selective colleges exploit this. So Suzy and Jacob likely go off to some obscure nobodyville college, they discover they are free to do whatever they want and crazy mom and dad can’t make them play anymore. Whether at a decent college or not, they’re just not into it. And who can blame them? All that free time pissed away to ride the bench, or if you play, it’s in front of a tiny crowd. |
Anonymous
| Seems like PP is the one who can’t admit defeat. Grapes were probably sour anyway. |