I was just talking to my cousin, who is trying to apply to US universities through tennis. He told me about some division systems where the quality of the school with respect to tennis results in its grouping to D1, D2, etc… He has received an offer from a D1 college (Univ North Carolina AT&T), and he told me that it will be easy for him to get into a D3 school like Yale and Cornell?! When I told him that these colleges wouldnt accept a recruit who is anything less than the best our is well rounded in other aspects especially academically, he gave me the example of a friend of his who wasnt too great in tennis, applied solely through tennis and got both Yale and Cornell!!!
If you are a good enough tennis player to be a recruited athlete then it is certainly a help with admissions. But that caliber of player is few and far between. For most tennis players the sport is a nice EC and nothing more.
In India we dont really have any prestige associated with inter school tennis. Its all with AITA( All India Tennis Association) rankings.
I`m talking about someone who is out of the top 100
This makes no sense. Is your friend saying that someone who isn’t academically qualified or athletically gifted got into a selective school as a recruited athlete and now your friend is banking on doing the same? I hope he’s applying to some safeties too.
It doesn’t matter where you are ranked in your country, it is a question of if your tennis is at a level where you would be a recruited college athlete. If you are playing at that level your coach should have a sense of where you’d stand. And while you do need to be academically qualified, the bar is typically set a bit lower for recruited athletes.
Applications are not made “solely through tennis”.
I would think that any D1/D2 coach would need to gauge an Indian player based partly on ITF events, and a player outside the top 100 in India probably doesn’t even have an ITF ranking. Tennis ability inside the top 30 in India might not even turn heads because we’d be talking about ITF junior rankings around 1000. Outside the top 100, for India, is not recruit worthy, so if that student has success with US college admissions, it won’t be because of their tennis ability.
Talk to the tennis coach and ask him/her to see if your child is qualified for Division 1 tennis in America.
The athlete still has to be academically qualified and satisfy the academic index for Ivies.