<p>I'm a Sophomore swimmer whose looking at going to Swarthmore, Amherst, Williams and other LACs in the upper New England area. For an athlete like myself who will be very competitive with the current teams at those schools, will a lower SAT score be ok? And if so how much lower on average?</p>
<p>Hopefully you’ll hear from a swimmer who can give you specific advice on this. That’s a selective bunch of schools you’ve picked out.</p>
<p>The evolving opinion on this board (they’ll correct me if I’m wrong :)) is that the SAT you will need depends on several things:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>How fast you can swim. It’s an inverse relationship. The faster you swim, the lower your SAT can be.</p></li>
<li><p>The SATs of the other admitted students. This is a guess on my part, but I would think you can’t be way below the middle 50% and expect to get past admissions. Look at the stats for admitted students for your schools and see where you fit.</p></li>
<li><p>How smart the rest of the swimmers are. Some sports draw smart kids. Maybe swimming is one of these. If all the other fast swimmers who are applying to your list have high SATs you’d better have one too.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Best wishes.</p>
<p>Williams, i believe, is more selective than stanford or harvard, making it the hardest school in the country (lac or university) to get in to. so for that school i think you’ll need a 2200 or better. however if u can swim like phelps than maybe lower.</p>
<p>i’m not lac or swimmer knowledgeable</p>
<p>^^^I agree with pacheight about the selectivity of Williams - and the other excellent schools you mentioned are right up there too. Not necessarily for swimming, but Williams did say they are looking for SATs in the mid-700s per section for a certain sport’s team members - and this is for a sport in which they excel. Good luck!!</p>
<p>Swimming is indeed one of those sports that draw smart kids. I wouldn’t count on getting in with lower SAT scores unless you are an olympic athlete.</p>
<p>A parent of a Williams athlete told me this athlete was aiming for the 25% level on test scores. This was for a successful recruit in women’s soccer.</p>
<p>And I can’t resist mentioning that the NY Times says Pomona is more selective than Williams this year 
As far as percentage of admits, they are both less selective than Stanford and Harvard… but there’s this whole self-selection argument that could support the idea that these tiny LACs are more selective.</p>
<p>Well, a family friend was told unless getting full support-only 4 slots for boys and girls swimmers-had to be 50% or better.
Maybe soccer is less selective than swimming. </p>
<p>The “bar” was 2100 SAT1s, and 700+ on 2 SAT2s. Told the same thing by Amherst coach, except he had 6 slots for male and female swimmers…</p>
<p>Said friend is a State finalist(top3)in 2 events, now a recruited athlete at Harvard.</p>
<p>My anecdote was very likely a case of full support.</p>
<p>You don’t have to be at the 50 percentile. Seriously, think. Exactly half of the campus is below that level. I don’t know why everyone is freaked out when they aren’t top 50% at a school. Half of the people admitted are lower than that level.</p>
<p>“How smart the rest of the swimmers are. Some sports draw smart kids. Maybe swimming is one of these”</p>
<p>“Swimming is indeed one of those sports that draw smart kids”</p>
<p>Indeed it is one of the sports that draws really smart kids. Also those are D3 schools, correct? D3 schools might give you like 200 pts lower (out of 1600). But once again swimming is a sport that draws a lot of really smart kids, so you may not get the luxury of a couple hundred points flux on your SAT’s for the sport of swimming.</p>
<p>I agree, there’s something about the demanding training regimen which typically translates into higher grades and better time management skills. That said, I saw a recent report from UC San Diego where student-athletes had something like a 3.90 GPA coming out of high school, compared with a 3.95 for the school overall. In this instance, being an athlete really didn’t buy much.</p>
<p>haha, the half that are below have some other attractive attribute, or fab grades AND some other attractive attribute. We’re just giving advice on what to expect, or what to strive for to make chances more likely…</p>