The athletes at Harvard, outside of some niche sports, wouldn’t be able to play at Michigan or Notre Dame or schools of that athletic caliber. They aren’t good enough.
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Depends if you define ice hockey and lacrosse as niche sports where Ivy League teams are usually highly ranked. Crew might also be considered a niche sport. I mention these sports as ones where they do draw wide student and alumni interest and recruiting is necessary to be competitive. Actually in many “second tier” but widely played sports which are equivalency sports, the Ivies (and definitely HYP) often are more attractive financially because their financial aid packages are more attractive than partial athletics plus whatever FA at other D1’s and is not subject to the student continuing in the sport, including dropping the sport because of injury.
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Perhaps to appeal to the potential outstanding applicants who appreciate the different sort of school spirit, camaraderie, and relaxation that being without a big organized sports scene provides.
For example, I’m pretty sure that students at NYU see the lack of big sports as a feature, not a bug.
I think this is a common assumption, probably based on football.
But it isn’t the case in Track and Field (which I admit might be a niche sport at the professional level, but which has the highest participation levels of any HS sport in the US).
I think at most of these schools, Track accounts for one of the largest buckets of recruiting slots.
Quite a few T&F athletes are deciding between Ivies and schools exactly like Michigan (or UW, Duke, Wisconsin, UNC, etc.).
The Ivy League typically has a few teams ranked in the top 20 in XC and their athletes would fit well on most P5 rosters. The Princeton men were 5th at Track NCAAs a few years ago and the Harvard women sixth and men 11th last year. Both teams had individual champions over the last few years.
Some Ivy Track and Field athletes had extra eligibility in the last few years due to Covid, and ended up as grad transfers at schools like Washington, Duke, NC State, Virginia, etc. In fact, Duke won their first ever ACC women’s championship a few years ago largely due to Ivy transfers.
So, Ivies are definitely competing for top caliber athletes in Track. It’s an equivalency sport, so the incentive structure @BKSquared mentioned plays a role.
Worth mentioning, too, for those who are concerned about Ivy athletics skewing white and wealthy is that this is one of the most racially and socioeconomically diverse sports in the country.
There are quite a few other sports where I think folks underestimate the level of talent at Ivy schools. One could make a similar argument about a sport like wrestling, for example, which brings in great athletes and is a sport that connects a lot of working and middle class families to these schools.
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I was thinking more of the big 3 sports. I realize that the ivies have excellent T&F athletes. I believe a Harvard grad recently medaled in the 200 at the world championships. T&F is an under appreciated sport in the US, unfortunately.
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Ironically, Princeton has two alums who just won the World Series.
Yes. And Ryan Fitzpatrick played in the NFL. Those are outliers - in the case of football your best talent is going to Alabama, not Harvard. In basketball, it might be Duke or UNC or Kansas - of course, many of those super talented players are one and done so calling them student athletes is a stretch - they are athletes first and students a distant second.
I had a kid that was recruited to HYP for T&F. The talent was up there with most top D1 programs, @politeperson makes very good points.
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Christian Braun won the NCAA Championship with Kansas in 2022, graduated, played for the Nuggets in 2022-23, and won an NBA ring. Student and athlete all rolled into one.
They are all outliers. There are Cinderella stories (Princeton in the Sweet 16, St Peter’s in the elite 8). Yale won the men’s lacrosse championship about 5 years ago, individual athletes from Ivies and smaller conferences will go to the Olympics
Everyone will be happy. But the Ivies aren’t giving up recruiting.
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Right, though the niches in total are the majority. If you look at the Equity in Athletics numbers for Harvard, as an example, the total # of varsity athletes in Football + M/W Basketball + Baseball + Softball + M/W Volleyball - which I think are really your only sports where Ivy League schools are consistently non-competitive - were 259 of the 1344 athletes, or 19%. (Not removing duplicates because we don’t know what sports they are in, etc.) I don’t think you can say the other 81% aren’t good enough.
Also worth noting that Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, etc. are competitive in those and all other sports, as are some of the very selective state schools, and Stanford dominates the Director’s Cup.
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I think it’s more of a case where many athletes at Michigan and Notre Dame would not pass muster with admissions.
Big time football and basketball, where athletic money is on the table and players may be hoping for a professional career, is an entirely different eco-system. Players are often most motivated by what school will get them where they want to go athletically and that means playing for programs that compete at the highest level. That’s not the Ivy League. Many of these same players won’t finish college (especially in basketball) - you can consider them “students” only in the loosest of terms. Of course, that isn’t what is going on at elite schools where athletes are expected to be students first and athletes second.
They may, but I am sure that the administration doesn’t given the conference that they play in (UAA) and the intensity of their recruiting.
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NYU’s athletics history is similar to U Chicago’s
Was originally D1
1952 Dropped football program which played at Yankee Stadium
1971 Dropped basketball program
1981 Moved remaining sports programs from D1 to D3
1983 Reinstated basketball as a D3 sport
2014 Added baseball and softball
But the school’s location in downtown Manhattan makes it difficult to support sports programs. Despite the inherent constraints, the 21 varsity sports teams seem to be an institutional priority. The university seems to be supporting athletics as much as they possibly can and they even kept their fencing teams D1.
14 teams don’t even have a home at NYU.
Basketball and volleyball teams play at Hunter College
Baseball and softball teams play at the Coney Island home of a minor league baseball team.
Soccer teams play at Manhattan College in the Bronx
Golf teams don’t have a home golf course.
Tennis teams play at the Stadium Tennis Center in the Bronx
Track & Field teams compete in the Armory uptown or in Staten Island.
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Unless I missed it, we have to give Hoops props to Jeremy Lin (Harvard 2010). I think there will be more super smart/super athletic kids taking the Ivy route and passing up the traditional D1 power schools in the years to come.
Amazing interview linked below as he details his high school/college/pro journey, and how he was virtually passed over by the NBA simply because he was Asian and went to Harvard.
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The value of college athletics is a healthy debate. My problem with the article is that it criticizes athletics because it favors white applicants. SCOTUS tells us that skin color (i.e., race) cannot be considered in college admissions. Grit, if you call it that, may. A true meritocracy in college admissions, or otherwise, is a long way off, but like it or not (and FWIW I don’t) affirmative action is no longer a consideration in college admissions.
If race may no longer be legally considered, why criticize athletics because it favors a racial category? By contrast, it is a valid criticism if athletics favors the wealthy. Though anecdotal, I’ve witnessed plenty of decidedly non-wealthy families (wisely or unwisely) scraping last dimes together to support their kid’s college dreams. Nevertheless, it is a valid exercise to ask whether and by how much athletics favors the wealthy – I’ll bet it is not as simple as it seems.
Since we are talking Harvard, an Atlantic article suggests that at Harvard, “46.3 percent of recruited athletes in the class of 2022 [hail from families] . . . with household incomes of $250,000 or higher, compared with one-third of the class as a whole.” College Sports Help Rich White Students Get Admitted - The Atlantic. This does suggest that a greater proportion of athletes come from wealth, but it is way less than I expected. In fact, more than half of athletes are coming from the lower (if you can call it that) income category.
Just more fodder for the debate.
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Deleted for redundancy.