Why D1 if the school is only so so?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am getting confused. Is the better stigma from the no name D1 college or from the fancy elite private college?

The reality is all this bluster is about nothing more than puffing up ones chest on the sideline with other parents.

When the sideline is gone the comparisons end and folks simply tend to focus on their kids and nothing more. This is just one last opportunity for parents to claim how special their kid is to other soccer parents.

By this time next year the reality of their star watching games for the first time as well as the realities of college life just tend to sink in, as they should.

🙏 Preach.

What does that mean?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am getting confused. Is the better stigma from the no name D1 college or from the fancy elite private college?

The reality is all this bluster is about nothing more than puffing up ones chest on the sideline with other parents.

When the sideline is gone the comparisons end and folks simply tend to focus on their kids and nothing more. This is just one last opportunity for parents to claim how special their kid is to other soccer parents.

By this time next year the reality of their star watching games for the first time as well as the realities of college life just tend to sink in, as they should.

🙏 Preach.

What does that mean?

It means what was said is truth

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am getting confused. Is the better stigma from the no name D1 college or from the fancy elite private college?

The reality is all this bluster is about nothing more than puffing up ones chest on the sideline with other parents.

When the sideline is gone the comparisons end and folks simply tend to focus on their kids and nothing more. This is just one last opportunity for parents to claim how special their kid is to other soccer parents.

By this time next year the reality of their star watching games for the first time as well as the realities of college life just tend to sink in, as they should.

This is true. And we have people puffing about money and puffing about academics, and puffing about soccer level. Puff about whatever is important to you and then get on with it.

[Anonymous]

The reality is college soccer is very, very different than club soccer. It is a full-time job in season even for D3. It is a serious part-time job out-of-season for D1, but more relaxed for D3.

You add to it the pressures that come from the need to to also do decently well in college classes, and the still weird covid situation at many schools - both for regular students and student athletes.

Hopefully freshmen are taking reduced schedules (low end credits to maintain full-time status) and easier freshman classes that they have to take anyway to ease the transistion. It is a very difficult transistion and many kids do not make it well, if at all.

Kids need to go into their freshman year, friendly, polite, hardnosed, and realistic. There will be lots of people who are more than happy to kick their ass on and off the field -- sometimes literally.

For those that make it through their senior years -- good for them. They will have developed skills and exhibited leadership abilities that will make them appealing to many future employers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well, not everything is about the money.

If in ten years post college nobody asked what school you went to then what was it about?

The college experience you have has a definite influence on the adult that you become. You are shaped by it, your circle is determined by it, and so on. The effects are massive on your life. That's what its about.

Grad school it matters and generally limited to certain majors, Law, Business.

Undergrad? Not really so much. Do you really think Captains of Industry are keeping tabs with old drinking buddies from undergrad?

Your mileage may vary, of course. Every experience you have shapes you, whether you recognize it or not. When you surround yourself with successful like minded people, it tends to rub off. Its not too different from soccer. If you want your develop your skills more quickly, you play against better players. Typically, the more elite the college, the more accomplished and gifted the student body.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DP, but it seems quite obvious to me that “better stigma” is meant to be synonymous with “higher status.”

What has our world come to when "it seems quite obvious" that a thing is meant to mean its opposite?

Our world continues to be a place where some people can understand an awkwardly worded phrase because of context clues, and others apparently are too literal to do so. It also helps if you don’t pull one sentence of a paragraph out and quote it out of context, as you did with mine above. I’ll try once again to help you with your confusion, because I truly have nothing better to do today and this thread is amusing me.

To recap:
OP asked what was the allure of playing D1 at a tiny, rural, “so-so” school where the academics may not be challenging for the player (we do not know why OP has an animus toward small schools or rural schools—OP has not clarified).

One of the few PPs who has stayed on topic sought to answer this question. He briefly highlighted (1) things about tiny schools that some may find alluring, (2) things about rural schools that some may find alluring, and (3) things about playing D1 vs other levels of soccer that some might find alluring. He concluded by sharing his opinion that college is what you make of it (i.e., can be as challenging as you want it to be) and there is always grad school if you want a name school. His highlights for his (3) included the possibility that the D1 school might offer better competition, TV broadcasting of games, or “a better stigma”. While “better stigma” doesn’t make much sense, unless you are comparing two schools with negative reputations and one of them (the D1 school) at least doesn’t carry as bad a stigma as the other, it does seem quite obvious to me that by “better stigma” he meant higher status athletically speaking/more bragworthy to those who think it’s impressive to have the talent to play at a very high level. Note that status in this context is different from the USNWR academic status many of us on the College Forums discuss. To give an example even a very literal person may understand, being a regular football starter at LSU, University of Arkansas, or Auburn is much more athletically impressive than being a regular football starter at Harvard.

PP who used “better stigma”—please correct the record if any of this recap fails to capture your intent.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DP, but it seems quite obvious to me that “better stigma” is meant to be synonymous with “higher status.”

What has our world come to when "it seems quite obvious" that a thing is meant to mean its opposite?

Our world continues to be a place where some people can understand an awkwardly worded phrase because of context clues, and others apparently are too literal to do so. It also helps if you don’t pull one sentence of a paragraph out and quote it out of context, as you did with mine above. I’ll try once again to help you with your confusion, because I truly have nothing better to do today and this thread is amusing me.

To recap:
OP asked what was the allure of playing D1 at a tiny, rural, “so-so” school where the academics may not be challenging for the player (we do not know why OP has an animus toward small schools or rural schools—OP has not clarified).

One of the few PPs who has stayed on topic sought to answer this question. He briefly highlighted (1) things about tiny schools that some may find alluring, (2) things about rural schools that some may find alluring, and (3) things about playing D1 vs other levels of soccer that some might find alluring. He concluded by sharing his opinion that college is what you make of it (i.e., can be as challenging as you want it to be) and there is always grad school if you want a name school. His highlights for his (3) included the possibility that the D1 school might offer better competition, TV broadcasting of games, or “a better stigma”. While “better stigma” doesn’t make much sense, unless you are comparing two schools with negative reputations and one of them (the D1 school) at least doesn’t carry as bad a stigma as the other, it does seem quite obvious to me that by “better stigma” he meant higher status athletically speaking/more bragworthy to those who think it’s impressive to have the talent to play at a very high level. Note that status in this context is different from the USNWR academic status many of us on the College Forums discuss. To give an example even a very literal person may understand, being a regular football starter at LSU, University of Arkansas, or Auburn is much more athletically impressive than being a regular football starter at Harvard.

PP who used “better stigma”—please correct the record if any of this recap fails to capture your intent.

Thanks but you entirely missed my point - which was to question the state of world where your point is valid.

[Anonymous]

So to that poster, better stigma means the athletic team competes at a higher level than the worse stigma school.


To get back to the OP...it seems that if the level of athletic competition is a driving force in choice of college...that would explain why some players choose to forgo academic rigor in exchange for athletic rigor.

I have seen this on our team. I have seen some choose for academic rigor. I have seen some choose for financial rigor. I have seen some develop some type of compromise among the different factors.

A parent's job is to ignore what works for some other student and focus on what works for your own student and player.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Flash forward 10 years and you’re still paying off college loans from the private elite college that got you the same place as the VT grad.

To be fair, the schools they were referring to are 2 tiers below Virginia Tech. Nobody is putting down Tech on this thread, especially in this day and age you need close to a 4.0 to get in, if you are applying for engineering even higher.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Flash forward 10 years and you’re still paying off college loans from the private elite college that got you the same place as the VT grad.

To be fair, the schools they were referring to are 2 tiers below Virginia Tech. Nobody is putting down Tech on this thread, especially in this day and age you need close to a 4.0 to get in, if you are applying for engineering even higher.

In this day and age where a 4.0 is attainable by anyone who actually shows up to class?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Flash forward 10 years and you’re still paying off college loans from the private elite college that got you the same place as the VT grad.

To be fair, the schools they were referring to are 2 tiers below Virginia Tech. Nobody is putting down Tech on this thread, especially in this day and age you need close to a 4.0 to get in, if you are applying for engineering even higher.

It depends on the major. So you can’t necessarily tier the schools

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Flash forward 10 years and you’re still paying off college loans from the private elite college that got you the same place as the VT grad.

To be fair, the schools they were referring to are 2 tiers below Virginia Tech. Nobody is putting down Tech on this thread, especially in this day and age you need close to a 4.0 to get in, if you are applying for engineering even higher.

In this day and age where a 4.0 is attainable by anyone who actually shows up to class?

When I was a kid a 4.0 meant something … and I had to walk 5 miles thru snow and ash and ghettos to get to school. Yes, you’ve just become your own parents.