As far as I know the band system only applies to football in the Ivies. For other sports, from what I understand each coach likely has an AI target for his/her recruiting class from the athletic director, in order to allow recruits across all sports to hit the league requirement of being within one standard deviation of the overall student average.
What I think this means is, recruits with a high AI do have an advantage. Of course if it were up to the coaches, they would want the best possible athletes, but they also have to balance that with AI.
Do you guys think attending ivy camps in the summer between sophomore and junior years is worthwhile?
@brazos21 My sense for football recruitment is recruitment doesn’t begin until after junior year football season unless someone is a going FBS. Thus, there’s really no point in going to the camps. Unless you want to go to 1 to see what they’re all about. However, I wouldn’t expect anything to come of it
I agree with @fbislife. Ivy recruiting is not Power 5 recruiting, and things don’t really start rolling until spring/summer of junior year. That said, if I had to do it all over I would have taken my son to one Ivy camp as a junior just so he had a better idea of what the camps/competition would be like. If nothing else, it would have cut down on some of the uncertainty going in to his camp season.
So as a tool to gauge the level of competition and whether a kid potentially has the skills to play at that level going to a camp as a junior could be helpful. But as an effort to get “a leg up” on the recruiting process at a particular school? Nah, I don’t think it matters at all.
@ohiodad51, you say your son is a STEM major? That’s really reassuring; my own son takes academics very seriously and his biggest concern is balancing commitments to the team versus commitments to his own education. How has your son’s academic experience at his Ivy been so far (if you don’t mind sharing)?
Over all, he is very busy and finds it challenging. But he was generally bored academically in high school and is the kind of kid who likes a challenge. He has said several times that he likes that his classes don’t “waste time” like they did in high school. He loves the lab work, and really likes that there is a ton of “legit research” going on all the time. He is doing well in his classes so far, particularly given the commitments of football which are significant. The decision both to attend Princeton and to study a rigorous major was absolutely the right choice for him, at least so far.
So yeah, it is more than possible to play ball and major in STEM subjects in the Ivy. But it requires a lot, and my son has more than a few teammates who have transitioned from engineering and STEM classes to more of a humanities focus.
Parent of a varsity BSE Princeton grad (class of 2016) here. I agree with the above posters and would say it’s very possible to do well as an engineering concentrator/varsity athlete but you do need to be an excellent time manager. My son often worked on problem sets while in airports, on buses, in vans, hotel rooms etc. Mid terms/finals combined with competition times were the most challenging and he learned to manage on a lot less sleep for a couple weeks each time. Strong academic preparation at the high school level will help develop the skills to manage the demanding load of being an Ivy athlete, but taking every AP offered and being involved in every possible EC is certainly not expected. Be strategic about which ones will actually help the student with their coursework (ie - AP calc for engineers etc).