RantingSoccerDad wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
RantingSoccerDad wrote:
I think everyone who is going through or has gone through college admissions would disagree. There are plenty of people on the general Travel Soccer thread who know it's very difficult to get a scholarship and nearly impossible to get a FULL scholarship, but they see soccer (or lacrosse or field hockey or rowing or whatever) as a good way to get a leg up in college admissions.
If you want to play college soccer at Virginia, the higher bar to clear will be the soccer bar. You have to be a 99.9th-percentile player to be considered for that level. If you can clear that bar, it's unlikely you'd have trouble clearing the academic bar. You might not want to have a 1.5 GPA or an 800 combined SAT, but you can definitely get in with grades and scores that wouldn't get other people a second look in the admissions process.
Isn't that another example of delusional youth sports thinking? If a kid is not a strong enough player to merit a soccer scholarship, why would a college coach try to bend admissions policy for the kid?
And if your primary goal is enhanced college admission then how about, you know, trying to do better at school.
To answer your question on scholarships -- soccer teams don't get that many. For men, it's 9.9 in Division I, 9 in Division II, 0 in Division III. For women: 14, 9.9 and 0. So in D1 and D2, a lot of kids are on partial scholarships.
Division III includes schools like Johns Hopkins. Top Drawer Soccer lists a couple of their commitments -- one 2018, one 2019:
https://www.topdrawersoccer.com/college-soccer/college-soccer-details/women/johns-hopkins/clgid-1082/tab-commitments#tabs
Now -- is all of this an example of delusional youth sports thinking? I think so, sure. If it's me, I'd only start thinking about such things if my kid was awesome in soccer but was stuck in the 1200s on the SATs (on the 1600 scale) -- maybe solid enough to handle the coursework at a place like UVA but not good enough to get in from Northern Virginia.
And again -- I'm not saying this is fair. But just realize that most schools are going to have a lot of athletes in all sports who got in because they play sports. Not exactly new -- in one class in my high school 30 years ago (ouch), the valedictorian didn't get into the Ivy League, but our best basketball player (an OK student but not exactly someone who took a lot of academic honors) did, and he didn't even end up making the team.