I know nothing about water polo, so this is meant generally. Prep schools recruit too! And can be very generous with financial aid. There is more economic diversity at some prep schools than at some wealthy public school districts.
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I also don’t doubt your experience with recruiting, but recruiting and walk-ons are not mutually exclusive. Plenty of men’s and women’s rowing teams that recruit athletes also have many walk-ons. Searching some random teams.
UCSD
We are looking for dedicated and competitive individuals to join our winning team! UC San Diego Men’s Rowing is consistently one of the top programs in the country and we do it all with walk-on student-athletes with no prior rowing experience.
Harvard
While many collegiate sports at Harvard accept walk-ons, few are more walk-on friendly than Harvard crew. Every fall, the program welcomes a new, wide-eyed class of freshman eager to make their mark on campus.
…
One of those first year walk-ons is current member of Harvard men’s heavyweight crew, Zach Keller.
Princeton
“There are opportunities for everybody,” says Princeton assistant lightweight coach Bill Manning. “Every kid can row in college who wants to row in college, but they just might not be formally recruited to row in college.”
.When I last heard, Stanford’s official statement was anyone who wanted to row on the freshman/novice team could row, similar to the Princeton quote above. However, less officially there was strong encouragement for only a particular height and build. There was also less direct discouragement by selecting which kids were in which boats. Few students want to wake at 5:30 AM each day to be effectively benched, with little attention from coach and little time in an eight, so little hope of ever participating in intercollegiate competition.
Fencing parent here. The six figure number is not the norm, and we live in a major metropolitan area where costs are high. It’s a catchy headline designed to get folks talking. And wow, it worked!
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To get the recruited athlete admission boost for Stanford women’s rowing, those athletes are probably top 1%. The 2k erg time is only the starting point, and coaches are looking for women who are under 7:15 for time. The rowers that I have seen recruited recently there (all excellent students with high SAT scores) were US Rowing U19 team members or US Rowing National Champs as well, so literally some of the fastest women in the country who can really move a boat well. The team has been battling it out with UT for the NCAA title in the recent years. They are certainly more successful than the football team. 
Lastly, I’ll leave with this - https://www.ncaa.com/news/rowing/article/2018-08-15/why-roster-spot-ncaa-rowing-team-could-be-one-hardest-earn-college
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You are correct. The requirements to be a RECRUITED rower at HYSP (+Duke, UVA, Michigan, other Ivys, etc.) are exceptionally high: grades more or less at the average for other applicants and tippy-top 2ks and on the water results.
Just about any athletic student can walk on to any rowing team because coaches can easily scale practice to multiple 8s and 4s. But, that’s completely different from receiving admissions support as a recruited athlete.
These NYT articles miss the personal commitment required to be a top athletic recruit. They make it sound like success is a function of parent funding. I think athletic success is driven by the students’ dedication, focus, and willingness to sacrifice - attributes colleges want in all applicants.
The best rowers are spending 20+ hours a week year-round training, plus missing entire Saturdays and weekends for travel to regattas. The opportunity cost for the student is very high with little time for homework, outside research, internships, part-time jobs, and even social life outside of the sport.
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Looks like 11 of 29.
In my lifetime, I have known 3 rowers who were in the Olympics who had not rowed before college. That makes me think that there are plenty more!
It doesn’t take much to convert an excellent athlete from another sport into a rower. Otoh, I’ve never heard of someone taking up fencing, gumnastics, soccer, etc. in college with lots of success.
To be recruited, a kid has to have natural talent and enough love for the sport to put in the time and effort. And they need a situation which makes that possible, whether money, access to facilities, coaching, etc. It’s easy for folks to focus on the second set of things without appreciating how few also have the first set. Yes, most recruited athletes have enjoyed some privilege and good fortune but they have also worked hard to make the most of that.
Philosophically, I don’t love the idea that exceptional athletic ability and achievement move a student to the front of the admissions line. Nor do I love that scholarships fund this over students with need. It seems like an odd priority (and I say this as a former multi-sport college athlete) based on the purpose of an institution of higher learning. With that said, my sentiments aren’t going to change that, and smart kids - athletes and not - will extract the academic value from any school they attend.
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While Stanford women’s heavyweight team has had good success. The other 2 rowing teams (men’s and women’s lightweight) have had more challenges. The school dropped the 2 sports entirely in 2020. This is the first team year of being reinstated. I expect they had a notable drop in recruiting quality with so little time after being reinstated.
Stanford pours money in to football, spending something on the order of $30 million per year, yet they still make a profit of $10+ million per year, a larger profit than any other Stanford sport. In contrast, women’s rowing had loss of nearly $2M per year in recent years – a larger loss than any other Stanford NCAA sport. By this metric football is more successful. It is certainly less likely to be dropped by the college. I expect Stanford is also willing to bend admission standards much further for football recruits than rowing recruits.
There is a lot of variation between the different school you listed. There is also variation between men’s team, women’s team, lightweight team, coxswain, etc. Schools try to recruit the best students they can, and that “best” threshold varies for different schools, different teams, and different years.
While one needs to be an excellent athlete in the sport, making a blanket statement like needing to be in top 1% to be recruited, including all teams/positions at all of the above colleges is incorrect. I do not know the exact threshold for each school/position, but I do know anecdotal examples of rowing recruits who were far from some of thresholds listed in this thread.
In most NCAA sports, one can make of rough estimate of the relative difficulty of being recruited and top % required by comparing the number of high school participants to the number of recruiting spots and/or scholarships. Unfortunately his measure is not as meaningful in rowing because the bulk of high school participation is outside of traditional high school teams, with less standardization and less clear totals.
Again there is a lot of variation between different schools and different teams. Saying " any athletic student can walk on to any rowing team" is incorrect. Some teams do have nearly open walk-ons for freshman/novice. Some teams have tryouts and only allow a small portion of top performing applicants to walk on. Some have no official tryouts and few/no walk ons. Nobody said walking on was the same as being a recruited athlete.
Coaches do tend to find athletes from the same programs. My daughter’s college coach recruited 5 kids from daughter’s club team, the other 4 (not daughter) from the same high school (same coach as the club team). The club/high school coach liked what the college coach was offering and referred a lot of kids. These students were also, except one, really smart and wanted to be in the majors (STEM) offered at this college (the other one liked the scholarship money and majored in communications).
I’m sure you can find a lot of teams at Ivies and other elite schools with players from the same prep schools. You can also find lots of non-athletes from those same prep schools at Ivies. Prep school kids tend to go to elite colleges.
I live in the west. More kids dream of Stanford than Dartmouth. Three of the 16 women on Stanford’s basketball team are from Colorado high schools (2 from the same one, were on the same team) and I’m sure more are looking at Stanford while being recruited now. I know 3 guys who played on the Army lax team at the same time who had also played together as grade schoolers (2 went to an elite prep school, 1 to the big name high school here). Clayton Kershaw and Matthew Stafford played together as little leaguers. Became professional athletes from the same youth program. It happens.
Athletes need to earn their successes. However, parental circumstances and choices matter in whether they have the opportunity to do so.
This is true for academic achievement as well.
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Yes, success is earned. The stereotype of the middling jock from privileged background only goes so far these days. A lot of athletes, my kid included, could either do all the currently common STEM/academic extra-curriculars OR sport.
My kid chose sport and dropped their math circle involvement in order to try and pursue the goal of competing internationally next year. For a future STEM student (engineering is the probable course of study), sports scheduling has also impacted the ability to pursue some science courses in school that would be appropriate.
You can only compete while you’re young in many sports. That may cut students out of some competitive college programs. But some kids don’t want to grind through STEM courses and STEM ECs when they have other interests that equally define them. And they are not strangers to failure or losing - a common experience in sport they have to come to terms with.
My kid’s sport is a winter one; they are usually more expensive due to equipment and coaching. Used to be more lower and middle-class kids could do it at a high level; now, it’s either the rich or children of athletes, or privately-sponsored athletes, who are in the highest ranks.
While many athletes could row at the college level, few could row at the Olympic level. For example, beyond general athleticism, the heights of the men’s 8 on the 2020 US Olympic team are listed below. All 8 members are at least 99th percentile height among US males. The average high school athlete doesn’t fall in to this group. There are also other physical advantages in terms of things like limb length, flexibility, weight/muscle distribution, body fat, etc.
Hack, Michslavich – 6’8"
Mead, Richards – 6’6"
Corrigan – 6’5"
Best, Davidson, Harrity – 6’4"
I was in the good general athleticism without previous rowing experience group. On my first practice after joining mid season, I had better rowing erg times than the majority of the novice team. However, the rowing erg time didn’t translate directly in to time in the water. My first time in the water, I could barely even stay balanced (on a pair). It wasn’t until some time later until I had a seat on a racing eight, and I started as the weakest member on the eight. I lacked technique, flexibility, timing, etc. These skills gradually improved over months of practice.
I think a large part of the reason why there are a often walk-ons with no past experience is large team sizes (rowing has largest average roster count of any NCAA women’s sport) with scoring determined by more than just a small number of the top team members, combined with a relatively small pool of HS kids with previous rowing experience compared to most other sports. Another part is the sport places a greater emphasis on athleticism over technique than a good portion of others, such as fencing.
Other sports that have a relatively small pool of HS kids can also have persons without HS experience competing at Olympic level. For example, I knew one woman who was recruited to join the Olympic bobsled team training camp, without previous bobsledding experience… She told me they recruited college track and field athletes who excelled in sports that had a good correlation with athleticism type abilities required for bobsledding. There were probably also filters for height, weight, build, and similar.
I agree regarding “a middling jock.” But for a recruited athlete, entry into these colleges is much, much easier than for equally outstanding students who are not recruited athletes. While this certainly speaks to what the colleges value, it isn’t clear to me that they’ve “earned” admission any more than the otherwise equally or better qualified applicants who are rejected.
I think this is the issue some are addressing. There are a lot of spots being set aside for kids who are the “best” of the privileged few who have the opportunity and resources to pursue these sports. That’s what the colleges value, but some are questioning whether they should.
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But I would argue that entry actually ISN’T much, much easier. It’s just that all the hard work and rejection takes place before the application cycle. Obviously not every sport is the same, but soccer starts 2-3 sometimes 4 years before fall of senior year. There’s a lot of reaching out to coaches, “interviewing” (coach conversation), vetting of academics – ie they have to be very high/good for selective schools, many, many college visits etc. @Mwfan1921 has written about this more articulately than I can.
I’ve had 3 go through the college process. My athlete had by far the hardest journey. The thing is, though, once they get an offer at one of their top choice schools, then their college process is over, before nonathletes have begun. But just because you see what happens at the end, don’t mistake that for an easy process.
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Yes, very true. But it’s the same thing for many top STEM applicants. There are a lot of first-gen students of foreign tech dual-income parents who are in the math clubs, robotics, Olympiads, etc. They are encouraged to do advanced course work at a young age. Have the parental hookups for the international non-profit/advanced lab work/research paper ECs that are common to such applicants. So, high academic/EC achievements and thus strong candidates for low admission-rate schools.
However, not all knowledge is academic. My kid had to choose a path between more STEM interests and sport interests and is YOLO-ing it with sports. For them, it’s a more authentic experience.
@cinnamon1212 raises an excellent point in that the sport path is not easy - the hours of hard work, rejection and failure, self-doubt, financial compromises that happens ALL happens before the application cycle. And that’s before you even start to look at schools! (For athletes that do high-level non-recruitable sports, it really is a genuine passion. Almost no ROI in practical terms.)
But yeah, schools really need to dig deeper into their own endowments or do specific funding for sports, IMHO.
But isn’t the point of the article to ‘Fence your way in’ to use the fencing to get an admission advantage? Being a walk on means you already got in for other reasons (grades? another award?).
It doesn’t really matter that women can walk on the crew team. What people want is to be a recruited athlete (fencer or otherwise), to get admission, and for those schools that allow it, scholarships.
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Like most longer threads on this website, the thread split in to several directions, some of which do not align with the original post. The linked article focuses on playing a sport to improve chance of admission to a highly selective college. While some student athletes want to get admission to a highly selective Ivy+ type college, that is not the only reason people play sports. I doubt that is even among the more common reasons students play sports.
In one survey of high school athletes, the most common reasons they gave for choosing to compete in high sports were having fun (81%), exercise (79%), learning and improving skills (66%), playing with and making new friends (66%), and competing (64%). Among the listed options in the survey, college scholarships was the least common reason given for playing sports. They didn’t ask about admission to Ivy+ type highly selective colleges. Similarly many students would also like to play sports in college, even if doing so does not increase chance of admission to grad school / job.
For example, the Place of Athletics Amherst (DIII school) report at https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/PlaceOfAthleticsAtAmherst_Secure_1.pdf divides athletes in to 3 groups as summarized below. It suggests ~1/3 of students are varsity athletes, yet Amherst says 80% of students complete club or intermural sports on their website. For the percentages to work out to 80%, this implies that >70% of non-athletes at Amherst choose to compete in sports while at the college.
Athletic Factor (~14% of students) – Outstanding athletes who are expected to have a significant impact on success of athletic team, Usually has lower admission reader rankings than typical admits suggesting strong admissions advantage, Maximum number of Athletic Factor admits is limited by NESCAC conference rules.
Coded Athlete (12-18% of students) – Excellent athletes who are flagged by coaches, Admission reader ratings for coded athlete admits are similar to non-athlete admits but admit rate is higher than non-athletes with similar reader ratings, NESCAC conference rules do not limit number of coded athletes.
Walk-On (~4% of students) – Athletes who are not identified or flagged by coaches, No admission preference, Often sees little playing time.
Non-Athlete (~2/3 of students) – Does not participate on in intercollege varsity competition; Vast majority do participate in sports while at Amherst, such as club sports or intermural sports.
Also relevant to the thread, the report also lists a variety of differences between athletes and non-athletes, which have been discussed in the thread. Demographic differences include the following. The difference in income between Amherst athletes and non-athletes appears to be especially notable at time of report analysis.
Low Income – 4% of Athletes, 31% of Non-athletes
First Gen – 3% of Athletes, 18% of Non-athletes
White – 74% of Athletes, 41% of Non-athletes
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@data10, as always, really helpful info.
One possible takeaway here is that if the school values diversity (income, racial, etc), you will be crowded out by athletes if you are white and well off. Which takes us full circle to the value of being recruited - especially if you are in that pool.
Schools have all sorts of buckets to fill as they create a class. Every student fills a few - from gender, need, geography, etc. So if the athletic recruits are accepted for what they provide to a team, they are also starting to fill the other buckets. By RD, there may not be a lot of room left in some of them.
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This is exactly right.
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Most schools have a very small percentage of recruited athletes. Harvard is approx 10% (2000 freshmen, 200 recruited athletes). Some athletes are neither white nor well off so they eat into that percentage too.
I even know some non-white, non-wealthy lax players.