Sports for college application
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Anonymous
| Is it easier to get admission in T20 college through fencing, if scholarship is not needed? |
Anonymous
I think someone posted upthread - or maybe I read it in one of the athletes in ED posts - T20 schools want to win, so they are going to recruit the more competitive fencers from Asia and Europe over full pay US fencers if the former are better. That's not to say your DC might not have a shot, but I wouldn't bank on it as a strategy. PP, DC had a classmate who wanted to play one of these kinds of sports @ a T10 school. The kid worked very, very hard over many years, but at the end of the day, there were simply stronger, more talented competitors. Landed a spot on a T25-30 school, which is incredibly impressive but also shows that dropping all your sports to focus on one is not a done deal for Ivy admission. |
Anonymous
There are only ~40 schools that offer fencing and financials are not a factor for recruitment, at least not from the schools' side. Junior national ranking (https://www.usafencing.org/current-point-standings) matters most, along with the ability to get through the admissions pre-read. The T20 include 7 Ivies (all Division I -- two have women only programs) do not offer scholarships of any kind (merit or athletic); Stanford (Division I), MIT (Division III), Duke (Division I), and Notre Dame (Division I). Duke and Notre Dame offer (very few) scholarships and these tend to be partial. There are not many recruited athletes for fencing. The coaches have perhaps 4-6 recruitment spots per year across two genders and three weapons. Others listed on the fencing rosters are walk-ons, meaning they were admitted to the school through a non-recruitment process and joined the team. https://www.fencingparents.org has a lot of info on the sport and a section specifically on recruiting. https://talk.collegeconfidential.com/t/the-only-college-fencing-recruiting-thread-you-need-to-read/1827194 is also a good resource. |
Anonymous
| ^^ I forgot to mention Northwestern (Division I) and Hopkins (Division III) in the T20. |
Anonymous
| Thank you! This is very helpful! |
Anonymous
| Theee are only 4.5 scholarships awarded for fencing |
Anonymous
Again, not sure what the point of this post may be. I get it...if you are the #1 in the country/world at anything then you can get into a top school. If you were to take the #1 rated HS football quarterback (or let's just take the best HS quarterback with a 4.0 GPA who I bet is still a D1 power conference recruit) and the Princeton coach honestly believed he wanted to go to Princeton (and wouldn't bolt after the first year in the transfer portal or that he was otherwise wasting his time recruiting him)...then he would get in to Princeton as well, especially in the test optional environment. Just so happens, these candidates want to play in the NFL so they pick Stanford (obviously the Holy Grail in terms of possibly an NFL platform and a top school), or Michigan, or Alabama, or OSU...you know the names. Just so happens, there is no professional outlet for fencing where you can make big $$$s...if there was, then the kids above would go fence at some D1 program. |
Anonymous
I don’t get your point either |
Anonymous
The point of the post was to clarify PP's comment in bold above. Anyone fencing at this level is doing it for the love of the sport, not to get into college, not to "go pro", not to make big $$$. Princeton is a D1 program for fencing. |
Anonymous
| Princeton has one of the top fencing programs in the country. |
Anonymous
This is a poster who does not know anything about fencing at the college level. The reality is that the top fencing programs in the country (Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, and Notre Dame) ARE Div 1 AND are highly ranked academic schools. Also, the schools that are one step down in terms of fencing are also highly ranked academic schools (Brown, Cornell, Duke, Northwestern, Saint Johns, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale). So nationally ranked fencers have it both ways, they can go to a highly ranked school AND train/compete at the highest college level and compete in Div I programs. There probably is no other sport where there is such a tight correlation between academic rankings and being at a Div I level. |
Anonymous
If your DS is in middle school, he should be competing in Y-14 and Cadet fencing tournaments. By that age, it is starting to become pretty clear who the top fencers are going to be. Does he have at least a C rating? Is he at least making the top 16 within his age group at North American Cups? Is he moving up the national rankings? Even at Div II schools, they are looking for at least a B rating, and the highly ranked Division I schools are looking for people in the top fifty on the junior points list, with the powerhouse fencing schools like Harvard and Princeton looking to take one or two people per year in the top twenty with proven national and international results. If this is not a reasonable track for your DS, you shouldn't be counting on this as a recruiting edge. Overall, you should be looking at which sport is most interesting to your DS, as becoming someone good enough to be nationally recruited takes a LOT of work. Unless the child loves the sport, it will become a grind and the child will likely quit. So just looking at recruiting chances doesn't make sense without taking into account the sport the child finds most interesting/fun. |
Anonymous
You actually are moving away from the main point. This thread is about using sports to gain entry to a top school. Fencing was thrown out as an avenue to do so, which implied that somehow the competition for entry is lower because fencing is a niche sport (which of course is not true). Another poster then indicated that fencing is a great way in...all you have to do is become the #1 ranked fencer in the US. It was then correctly pointed out that if you are the #1 ranked person in anything you are probably nearly guaranteed entry. This was never about pursuing your sport at the highest level in college and going to a top school. This was about pursuing sports to get Ivy-league entry. Just so happens, the Ivies are also nationally ranked in soccer, lacrosse, crew and the New England ones (Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth) in hockey. Usually one Ivy emerges as the dominant Ivy school in basketball and sneaks into the top 25 rankings. Newsflash...all those sports recruit more athletes then fencing. All the Ivy leagues recruit for football which is Division III...football needs to recruit more players than most of these other sports combined. You can be the #4,000 ranked football player and get recruited to Princeton. However, unlike football, I doubt anyone is telling the #1 ranked fencer to not take the SAT/ACT because the school is now test optional and why stain your 4.0 (taking no APs or any honors courses) with a 1000 SAT score...maybe they would, but somehow I doubt it. |
Anonymous
| Fencing is not that hard to get good at and it is one of the easier sports to check the box with for college |
Anonymous
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No, I am not missing the point -- it is just that the conversation wandered off into other areas, including a claim that Ivy League schools are not Div I programs. The reality is that there are seven Ivy League fencing programs, and ALL are Div I. Further, three of the consistent top four programs are Ivy League. This concentration of top programs does not occur for Ivy League schools in other sports, so far as I know.
If you want the statistics on cross-sport opportunities, they are already compiled: https://lilovfencing.com/fencing-in-us-colleges/. |