I’ve read a lot about niches and how important it is to have one when daughter is applying to Ivy Leagues. It also seems that the stories I read are all e.g. daughter liked bowling so she made it to National and that helped her get into Yale. I’m using bowling as an example on purpose because I’m guessing that is not a recruited sport. I would love to see a chart of schools and sports: Princeton focuses on x,y,z; or Harvard recruits to crew and lacrosse every year. My daughter’s school offers so many great EC options it is overwhelming. I heard recently that Johns Hopkins offered full scholarships for Lacrosse twice to girls in a high school that had had few or no acceptances for a long time. I wouldn’t want to encourage my daughter to be captain of the bowling team or to start a mud bogging team (we are in the SE US) if it blows her chance to go to a great school because she didn’t choose tennis or golf or start a Poetry Club instead. For the record, I like bowling a lot - I’m just making a point. Thanks for any thoughts!!
I will say that I know a girl who got a likely letter (ie, was an athletic recruit) from Harvard as a sailor. (She was successful at the national level.) Harvard has a very successful sailing team, historically. Ivies in general and some of the elite LACs are probably more likely than most other schools to recruit or at least give a major bump to kids who are extremely successful in country club sports, such as squash, and other pastimes of the well-to-do, such as sailing and crew.
She had excellent academic credentials also. I don’t have the impression that these schools make the same kind of dip in requirements for these sports as they do for football, basketball, hockey, and the like.
If you go to nces.edu.gov they have a tool called College Navigator. Look up the school you are interested in and you will see a bunch of openable tabs. Open ‘Varsity Athletic Teams’ and you will see how many students participate in each sport. Divide that by four and you’ll know how many kids in a class are athletes.
Are all varsity players recruited? That I don’t know and I suspect that information is kept close to their chests. But that will give you the start of an idea of where they’re putting their athlete dollars.
All varsity players are not recruited. In many sports, most of the team is not recruited. In a few cases, some of the team has little previous HS experience. For example, I joined the crew team at Stanford, without any previous rowing experience. Quite a few other team members were in a similar position, even more so on the women’s team. Similarly an article talking about Harvard coach looking in the lunch line at the cafeteria to try to find students for the rowing team, some of whom have “never touched an oar” , is at http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/4/4/crew-walk-on-feature/ … With this much variation by sport, it’s difficult to make generalizations.
Your D could also just do what she enjoys (or what her friends are doing which for most HS kids is the same thing) and see what happens.
By the time your D is ready to apply to college, everything may have changed at every school you are interested in. And your D is stuck having spent 4 years as a varsity X when she could have been playing chess or been a debating champion.
Agree with the above. There are not right or wrong ECs. And what might be a big positive one year at one college may not be as important another year or at another college. I heard an admissions officer from an Ivy school tell a story to to make that exact point…one year admissions was informed that the orchestra really needed a harpist so being an experienced harp player became a bigger plus than normal in that admissions cycle – but after that the college didn’t need another harp player for the next four years as there is only one harp spot in the orchestra.
So my bottom line advice would be to not try and have your D develop activities to please a college but rather let your D use her ECs to find her own passions and shine.
For context though, there are not that many (relatively) high school crew programs to feed into college programs, so crew is known for recruiting people who are strong athletes, with the right physical attributes, to row in college. On the other hand, field sports, like soccer, lacrosse, field hockey, and individual sports, like swimming, tennis, golf and squash, are not like that.
More broadly, as a parent with two kids out of high school – focus on ECs they enjoy, whether it is academic ECs like Science Olympiad, Model UN, Mock Trial etc., or music, arts, sports etc. The point should be to authentically explore and develop interests, not twist into some version of what we think schools might be interested in!
Be aware there are no scholarships in the Ivy league. There is recruiting, but no scholarships.
Unless you have a sports superstar, it is hard to plan an Ivy league or elite school career based on the high school EC’s. Just because you are the captain of the bowling team doesn’t mean you are any good compared to the bowling team from the rival high school or the bowling captain from 3 states away. Unless you can help the Yale bowling team, you are just another applicant who is showing leadership through being a captain of the bowling team, or showing commitment by being on the team for 4 years, or showing community service through organizing a bowl-a-thon.
You can look at the rosters from any sport at any school and see where the players went to high school. Pull up the hockey teams and you are going to find a lot of Canadians and boarding school kids. Pull up the lacrosse teams and Maryland and Long Island will appear often in the hometown column.
While crew has more walk-ons than most, many other teams at ivies have a notable number of walk-ons. For example, in the Harvard freshman survey, 10% of students said they were recruited athletes. A far larger percent of the student body are varsity athletes playing on their 40+ teams, without even considering the recruits who choose to not play all years (no athletic scholarships).
There are some sports that can be picked up quickly by good athletes. Crew is one as it takes a certain body type (tall and strong) and then repetition of the same movement. Other sports really can’t be picked up in a year or so - baseball, lacrosse, golf, hockey. Too many moving parts, years and years to build up a skill package, throwing and catching, wall ball, hitting thousands of buckets of balls.
My daughter had two transformed soccer players on her team. They were great athletes but they weren’t great lacrosse players. Just couldn’t throw and catch. Once the coach could recruit enough experienced lacrosse players, the walk-ons and soccer players were gone. I don’t think there is anyone on the team now who didn’t come in as a freshman recruit. There have been walk-ons and transfers, but they don’t stay the course.
Your oldest daughter is TEN ears old. TEN years old.
At this point, she should be allowed to be a TEN year old…not a college wannabe. She should be allowed to try lots of different things…and figure out what SHE enjoys doing…not what some college 8 years in the future might think is OK.
Please. Let her explore things. Maybe she wants to try quilting. Or knitting. Or singing in a children’s choir. Or gardening. Or robotics. Or math club. Or swimming. Or chess. Or golf.
Ten year olds need to be given chances to try lots of things. The most important thing she needs to do now…in my opinion…is learn how to be a member of a group or team.
And you know…in 7 years or so when she is applying to college…she might not be interested in applying to an elite school at all. Not at all.
Lol, I think you need to stop reading stories and learn what the colleges say. It’s not really “niches.” Balance and the right rounding matter. But there’s little way to project a kid’s strengths at ten.
10 yo is already too late to get to the ivy leagues recruitable level in the number of sports.
You, probably, already know if she is athletic and competitive or not. You just find what your daughter is good at and help develop that. It may or may not be sports.
Actually @Tanbiko , you have it backwards. At ten, you cannot make any judgement about their future athletic potential. The pros have a whole bunch of people that were cut/ didn’t play for their HS team. Michael Jordan was cut from his HS team. Lionel Messi was cut from a soccer team at age 11.
It’s not just a matter of complexity of movements. Other key factors include the number of allotted recruiting slots, how important the sport is to the university, and the portion of qualified applicants in the pool who excel in the sport. For example, rugby can have some fairly complex movements. Nevertheless, there was a recent letter in which the women’s rugby team at Harvard complained about unfair treatment and needing to resort to “postering, tabling in dining halls, and emailing over listservs to field a complete team”, with some on the team who have never played before attending Harvard. Football probably has less complex movements than rugby (overall, a few positions are exceptions), yet all but ~2 players on Harvard’s football team were recruited athletes, and the few walk-ons almost certainly were excellent players on their HS team with many years of experience.
@Eeyore123 , I am sure that MJ and LM were both athletic and competitive when they were 10. You cannot pass complete judgement about the athletic potential of a girl at 10 but if you put her on a soccer field and she picks up dandelions and chats with her friends instead of running after the ball then maybe parents should spend their efforts elsewhere.
Of all the problems with your post, this is the killer misunderstanding. There is no activity that will “blow” your child’s chance at an elite school.
If your daughter is a recruitable athlete- and she would have to be very good to be recruited- then that is a definite leg up on admission to elite universities.
Otherwise, the most that any particular activity will do for admissions is ‘tip’ it. For example, suppose she is a strongly competitive candidate who happens to be a regional-level harpist, and the orchestra asks Admissions to keep an eye out for harp players this year. Then, the EC could ‘tip’ it. That is so random that you can’t plan for it.
As a gift to your child, please consider this: you appear to be fixed on getting your daughter into one of 8 name-brand schools. That is your dream. Please don’t force it on your child. Mostly for her, but a little bit for you also. I know 2 moms who raised their daughters (and another with a son) with an “Ivy only” standard. As it happens, each of the kids was indeed very smart, very hard working, did all the right things and had ‘perfect’ resumes. Two even had strong legacy connections. There was trauma all round when they didn’t get into any Ivies.
There was truly nothing more that parent or child could have done- but when a school turns down 90%+ of their applicants, that’s what happens. The kids felt like failures- and were angry that all their sacrifices, all the choices that had been made for that one purpose, were in vain. There was no joy in their (stellar) acceptances, b/c they knew that it wasn’t good enough. And the moms were not only disappointed that their own dream was crushed- but they were genuinely distraught at the realization of what they had done to their kids.
Please read this (substitute any name brand for MIT- it applies to all of them): http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/applying_sideways
Try and live by it over the next 8 years. You will both be happier for it.
Thank you so much! All of the feedback is extremely helpful! I have not talked about colleges with my daughter at all. She is way too young and I am very protective of “childhood”. We’ve been trying a couple of different EC and sports, etc. and I am absolutely NOT sold on her going to Ivies…
At this point, I am simply researching information and learning all about it. Thx again!!
Sing it long, sing it strong 
Sampling activities at that age is a great idea. Do keep in mind that being recruitable can be a double edged sword. It requires not just talent but a deep level of commitment and passion for the sport or activity (not as the means to an end but as a good itself). This passion can actually complicate the college search: Strong flagship state U doesn’t offer the activity or has a bad coach, dream Ivy has filled their slots for the year, slac doesn’t provide the right level of competition, etc. From the outside it can seem like a recruited athlete has unlimited options, but for the athlete who loves the sport (or the harpist who loves to play) it can be both a blessing and a curse.