Hating donut hole life: athletic recruiting version

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DD is at an Ivy playing her sport. She got zero financial aid. She's now a sophomore and has been a really hard road. She doesn't get much playing time and doesn't get along with her teammates very much. The students at the school are a little weird because they are so so smart and she still working on making friends. The grass is not always greener. In hindsight, I would have encouraged her skip to D1 and just go in-state as a regular applicant.

this is the problem when Ivies and other top schools relax the academic standards too much for athletes. Then if the kid doesn’t continue with the sport then they also don’t really fit in/match the level of the rest of the kids who got in on academic merit. This was my experience at one of the Ivies.

Yes yes yes. Even when they continue it is a problem. The ivy kids who are recruited athletes are more commonly than not weaker students, sometimes signifciantly. They struggle to just be average in difficult "curved to the mean" classes paths such as physics, calc, econ, engineering. Most do not attempt such classes or if they do they switch out. To be fair, for the non-athletes it is nice to have a guaranteed group who cannot compete well, and you can beat. I realize that sounds harsh but with grades on curves it matters and the non-athletes/non-weaker other hooks are happy to have whatever advantage they can.

Easily 50% of all athletes…and more like 75% for sports like fencing or squash…have stats that are at the 50%ile+ for the Ivy school. They have to for the academic indexes to balance out.

I don’t disagree they aren’t recruiting athletes with lower stats…but you are implying a much larger %age than is actual.

As do most rejected applicants.

We get that…but PP implied most athletes are weaker students which isn’t true.

You don’t get the point: the rejected pile (where most of these athletes would have been) does indeed consist of weaker students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DD is at an Ivy playing her sport. She got zero financial aid. She's now a sophomore and has been a really hard road. She doesn't get much playing time and doesn't get along with her teammates very much. The students at the school are a little weird because they are so so smart and she still working on making friends. The grass is not always greener. In hindsight, I would have encouraged her skip to D1 and just go in-state as a regular applicant.

this is the problem when Ivies and other top schools relax the academic standards too much for athletes. Then if the kid doesn’t continue with the sport then they also don’t really fit in/match the level of the rest of the kids who got in on academic merit. This was my experience at one of the Ivies.

Yes yes yes. Even when they continue it is a problem. The ivy kids who are recruited athletes are more commonly than not weaker students, sometimes signifciantly. They struggle to just be average in difficult "curved to the mean" classes paths such as physics, calc, econ, engineering. Most do not attempt such classes or if they do they switch out. To be fair, for the non-athletes it is nice to have a guaranteed group who cannot compete well, and you can beat. I realize that sounds harsh but with grades on curves it matters and the non-athletes/non-weaker other hooks are happy to have whatever advantage they can.

Easily 50% of all athletes…and more like 75% for sports like fencing or squash…have stats that are at the 50%ile+ for the Ivy school. They have to for the academic indexes to balance out.

I don’t disagree they aren’t recruiting athletes with lower stats…but you are implying a much larger %age than is actual.

As do most rejected applicants.

We get that…but PP implied most athletes are weaker students which isn’t true.

You don’t get the point: the rejected pile (where most of these athletes would have been) does indeed consist of weaker students.

No…they wouldn’t. If most of the athletes have stats equivalent to 50% of all the non-athlete existing students…why would they be rejected?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have a HS junior swimmer who has been practicing for about 20 hours a week for the first three years of high school.

Since he's good but not a superstar (Y nationals qualifier but not junior nationals qualifier), it's becoming clear that for him, swimming will actually be *limiting* his choices in college rather than giving him access.

Meaning: his times are good enough to get him into some ok DIII schools with no merit, but he could get into even better schools by not swimming and instead getting in on the merit of his grades and other extracurriculars.

Long story short: swimming in college had been a goal, but I think it's time to scale back and aim for club swim in college instead. And he's ok with that. It's actually kind of liberating!

Good for him! My sister and I both played D1 sports and quit after a year. Your world expands so much at that time of life, and there are so many other things to do and ways to spend your time. I mean, how much of your time do you really want to spend lifting weights in a little gym with no windows and staring at the bottom of a pool?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So, what you're saying is that families should understand the cost picture before they begin looking at colleges they can't afford.

Yes, but also don't let your kid put so much time into sports to get good enough to get recruited. In the end, it only works out if you can pay the sticker price, you're needy enough to get substantial aid, or your kid is willing to go to lower ranked schools to get athletic $.

There are only a handful of top schools that give athletic scholarships (and they're larger schools). None of the Ivies or NESCACs do. Maybe you already knew this, but I didn't when my kid started HS and put in 20+ hours per week into their sport. Hence the cautionary tale for other parents to not make the same mistakes we did.

This is really why I spend time on DCUM. Our oldest is ninth grade, and we are trying to figure out what to do about travel sports.

High school practice runs until 5:45 pm and no bus, so we have to pick them up, and then they have club travel practice a few hours later, getting home around 9:30 pm. This doesn't seem to make any sense when sports scholarships will be almost non-existent -- if academics should come first, doesn't that mean we should scale back the club sports? The high school team seems more fun than club travel. Also way, way cheaper.

A few kids who do travel sports will get scholarships. A few, not most kids. Somewhere exceptions to this must exist, but why would one really think they will be that rare exception?

Most kids who do travel sports would be better off enjoying their in-school sports and spending more time on sleep and on academics, while family saves the $$$$ that would have been spent on travel sports.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Youth sports is such a racket.

There are many, many other reasons besides athletic scholarships why it is good for kids to do sports.

I was thinking the same thing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ugh I hate not being rich right now. DC has athletic recruiting offers to some top SLAC schools, but they don't do athletic or merit scholarships. I ran the NPCs and we get zero financial aid at all of them, but they're just too expensive for us to pay full price.

Now DC has to either 1) go to lower ranked schools offering athletic/merit scholarships or 2) forego athletic recruitment and just apply EA to state schools or shot gun in regular decision in hopes of merit.

Tonight I have to tell DC that they can't go to either of the SLAC's that they really want and have offers to. And we're not prepared with essays because we spent oodles of time on recruiting on top of an intensive year round sports schedule.

I hope this serves as a cautionary tale for donut hole parents of younger athletic recruits. Don't waste your time on recruiting unless you can either pay full price, your kid is good enough to get a hefty scholarship at one of the few good schools that offers athletic scholarships *and wants to go to these larger schools*, or you qualify for significant FA.

My guess is you could have learned all of this about the finances (no athletic money, what the NPC came to, etc.) well before now. My guess is also that you are framing everything into doom and gloom. Example: A kid applying EA still has plenty of time to write essays. He would have had essays even if he recruited so it wasn't as if his prior path was ever going to be essay-free.

If your kid has offers already and is "out of time" for essays, I assume he is a senior in HS. Recruited seniors show things like their transcripts, senior courses, maybe a list of ECs, and they have significant communications with the coaches over a longish period of time. I have no idea why you would not have considered affordability until September because the things in the prior sentence are generally done over a longish process.


The cautionary tale should be:

Everyone should know that D3 schools and ivy leagues offer no athletic money.

Start your essays early in all cases.

Run the NPC early and stop chasing a school for whatever reason, including athletics, if you can't afford it.

[Anonymous]

Is he good enough to play for a patriot league school?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DD is at an Ivy playing her sport. She got zero financial aid. She's now a sophomore and has been a really hard road. She doesn't get much playing time and doesn't get along with her teammates very much. The students at the school are a little weird because they are so so smart and she still working on making friends. The grass is not always greener. In hindsight, I would have encouraged her skip to D1 and just go in-state as a regular applicant.

this is the problem when Ivies and other top schools relax the academic standards too much for athletes. Then if the kid doesn’t continue with the sport then they also don’t really fit in/match the level of the rest of the kids who got in on academic merit. This was my experience at one of the Ivies.

Yes yes yes. Even when they continue it is a problem. The ivy kids who are recruited athletes are more commonly than not weaker students, sometimes signifciantly. They struggle to just be average in difficult "curved to the mean" classes paths such as physics, calc, econ, engineering. Most do not attempt such classes or if they do they switch out. To be fair, for the non-athletes it is nice to have a guaranteed group who cannot compete well, and you can beat. I realize that sounds harsh but with grades on curves it matters and the non-athletes/non-weaker other hooks are happy to have whatever advantage they can.

Easily 50% of all athletes…and more like 75% for sports like fencing or squash…have stats that are at the 50%ile+ for the Ivy school. They have to for the academic indexes to balance out.

I don’t disagree they aren’t recruiting athletes with lower stats…but you are implying a much larger %age than is actual.

As do most rejected applicants.

We get that…but PP implied most athletes are weaker students which isn’t true.

You don’t get the point: the rejected pile (where most of these athletes would have been) does indeed consist of weaker students.

No…they wouldn’t. If most of the athletes have stats equivalent to 50% of all the non-athlete existing students…why would they be rejected?

+1 Ivies reject a lot of kids who would be great students there. That's why it's called a lottery school. The athletes just get a commitment to be accepted instead of playing the lottery. It's a hook, but most of them are still qualified.

[Anonymous]

another thread on this

if a kid has an offer to Amherst or Williams, and $20k-$25k off a top Patriot league school - every kid should choose amherst or williams. You will make up that discount within your first 3 years out of school

[Anonymous]

$20k-$25k a year above sorry

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Colleges shouldn’t be giving athletes special treatment and easy admissions.

Yes x 1000!

Athletics have been an institutional priority at elite schools for 150 years.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for creating a thread about it, OP.
It's not often that someone has the courage to acknowledge they might have done things differently, had they done more research.

We're not in sports, but my daughter has spent her life playing a musical instrument, working very hard at it and achieving a high level of proficiency. She could apply to good conservatories. She could even get a scholarship. Does she want to? No.

But instead of thinking it's all been time and money down the drain, I tell her that she should be proud of herself. She has persevered at a hobby that wasn't always easy. She has developed stamina and resilience. She has done too many auditions to count, and competed in so many competitions, and performed solo or with orchestra on stage (not counting youth orchestra). It has made her grow so much! It has given her poise, and taught her how to communicate with strangers, and how to work as a team with people she barely knows. She knows how to lead when she's the soloist or concertmaster. She knows when to melt into the group when inside a section.

It doesn't matter if your child doesn't get to play in college, or doesn't get the recognition he deserves for his years of hard work. What matters is how much he learned while doing it. No one can take that away from him.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Youth sports is such a racket.

There are many, many other reasons besides athletic scholarships why it is good for kids to do sports.

I was thinking the same thing.

Me too.

I get the feeling that most of the people obsessed with their kids playing college sports didn’t actually play sports themselves.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So, what you're saying is that families should understand the cost picture before they begin looking at colleges they can't afford.

Yes, but also don't let your kid put so much time into sports to get good enough to get recruited. In the end, it only works out if you can pay the sticker price, you're needy enough to get substantial aid, or your kid is willing to go to lower ranked schools to get athletic $.

There are only a handful of top schools that give athletic scholarships (and they're larger schools). None of the Ivies or NESCACs do. Maybe you already knew this, but I didn't when my kid started HS and put in 20+ hours per week into their sport. Hence the cautionary tale for other parents to not make the same mistakes we did.

Yes, it’s been that way forever. I worked in college athletics for nearly 20 years. For all 20, most parents completely overestimated the amount of athletic scholarship money that was out there. Unless you were football, M/W basketball and later VB, there just wasn’t much there except at the top top schools competing for national championships.

Drexel might have six baseball scholarships to split among 33 players.
Now that all might be changing with the House ruling, but bottom line is many schools just don’t have the $$$ to be giving 33 baseball scholarships.

Ivy and DIII have never given athletic scholarships. I believe Ivies can do some merit aid gymnastics to get the players they want but yeah, that has been the case for years.

Athletes, though, definitely get to knock on a different door than other applicants. It can be a valuable foot in the door.

But if you do the math, say 10 years of travel sports at, what, $5k a year? $7k? Kid almost certainly isn’t getting a $70k athletic scholarship.

These “showcase” tournaments, designed to get athletes in front of college coaches are for the most part a racket. But that’s another thread…

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don't think its at all called for to be snide and attack this parent. The fact is it is hard to predict ahead of time how your kid will do academically let alone athletically to be proactively ruling out whole categories of colleges

Agreed! College costs in the US are bananas. It's not OP's fault.