Also depends on sport. No Ivy League FB team is getting on a plane to play a P5 team. They’d get killed mercilessly.
BB? Penn and Princeton men’s BB is a different story. Most Ivy League soccer teams will play the big boys and girls. Track sends its elite athletes all over. In rowing, the Ivy League has some of the tippy top teams in the sport. So, yeah, Yale men’s rowing is going to compete against anybody, and they do.
I feel like I’ve seen the bigger Ivy League schools out here to play Washington in Tennis, and I’ve personally watched UW men’s soccer play Brown and, further back, Cornell (or was it Harvard?). And the Ivy League always has a boat in the Windermere Cup.
It’s just a different beast than D3, though I still agree with @nycnycnycnyc that low end D1 is beatable by good D3 programs.
Boy isn’t that the truth. Worth an amplifying response as a word of caution to not drink your own Kool Aid. We struggled with this a bit, but like you, it all worked out.
Most coaches were pretty up front with us and so I think we had a relatively easier time of it. One kid was an A Band-level recruit academically and a less accomplished athlete who had a load of potential and really looked the part. The other, a kid somewhere in the B-Band was one of those D3 kids who would have comfortably played at the D1 level and thus was a high-priority recruit. When you have one of those two, or if you’re lucky both, the process tends to go better. For one thing, each coach knows you have options without you having to say it out loud.
Good point that it’s just a different beast than D3.
Also agree that low end D1 is beatable by good D3 programs though that would depend a bit on the sport, Men’s or Woman’s, as well to some degree what qualifies as low end D1 and good D3. If D3 meaning a national championship team, that is a Very good team.
Though a good NESCAC D3 football program, which has some very good players, would not be able to compete against a fully funded low end D1 football program. Similar to an Ivy football team playing a P5 football team. Football may have the biggest difference but a few other sports may be somewhat similar.
Wrestling has a pretty big gap. The biggest issue is probably practice partners. If you have 4 years of D3 level partners, you won’t improve nearly as much as the guy who was thrown into the fire even in a low end D1 room.
The important points I rehashed with a couple coaches. Not all of them, but the few that were most interested in him and that he was most interested in.
When he got that first offer, the coach was laughing by the end of his conversation with me. This was his athletic and academic reach, the school he dreamed unrealistic dreams of wrestling for since he was 10 years old. The offer we hoped for but never expected. I don’t remember the conversation exactly, but something along the lines of:
“If he want’s to wrestle for X, he has a home here.”
“So is that an offer?”
“Yes”
“Does he need to do X?” (I asked a few different versions of this, both academic and athletic issues)
“I don’t care”
“So he has a firm slot”
“Yes”
“Is this dependent on anyone else you are looking at?”
“Dadof4Kids, yes, he has an offer. Yes we want him here. If he says yes, I expect to see him in the fall. I’m not sure what else you want me to say.” (laughing with/at me)
“OK, well, we need to have a serious talk this weekend. He will call you Monday. Thank you.”
There was a lot more that happened the next few months, but honestly I knew when I hung up the phone everything was over except the i dotting and t crossing on his due dilligence.
Could not agree more. Football is its own thing. You match the wrong demographics, and it’s not just a beat down; it can be downright dangerous. Like Nick Saban said about boxing: they break it up into divisions for a reason - the big guys hit harder. I think there’s also a big gap in basketball.
I love the expression about not drinking our own Kool Aid – we definitely made that mistake early in the process. Early enough that there was time to regroup but we definitely learned that lesson, and to ask detailed questions as we moved forward with other schools!
Amazing about Williams women’s crew – my D has a friend who walked on, never having rowed in her life. I’ve heard that there are a good number of walk-ons on the women’s side. (My D is a committed NARP.)
If memory serves me right, one of the Olympic coaches this year, a former Olympian herself, had been a crew walk-on (as a novice) at Colby. College crews often actively solicit members in those first weeks at school and ime, usually pick up a couple novices who end up in top boats after a year or so. And some go on to greater things than that! It’s a sport that is often the right one for kids coming from other athletic backgrounds requiring endurance and or strength.
This is a really interesting thread. I was very average HS soccer player back in the mid-seventies. The extent of my recruiting involved getting two letters from small D3 schools in Ohio. Back then soccer was getting popular just in specific areas of the country… The part of NJ I was from was getting known for soccer and the only reason i received the letters I found out later was because I was from this certain part of NJ.
We did visit one of the schools I got the letter from. The head coach and I kicked the ball around for maybe 10 minutes and he offered me a spot on the team. I ended up at a school with close to 20K kids and my athletic career was intramural flag football and floor hockey. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like being a college athlete at a small school.
This is really a great thread for anyone with a recruited athlete. I had no idea at all what is involved.
Was just commenting that Ivy schools like Brown may field D1 teams that are not very competitive against the public universities, so they have dropped many of these sports due to cost, equity and academic concerns; whereas, NESCAC schools have found a nice mid ground balancing competitiveness with equity/academics.
Wonder if Ivys have thought of going to D3? Seems like a much better fit for what they are trying to do. They would easily move next to NESCAC by way of soccer competitiveness. Doing so would be much better than cutting an entire sport.
Presume egos will not allow such heretical thoughts, regrettably.
Agree, it will never happen and I not sure that the NESCAC are a great fit either.
The NESCAC, especially the top NESCACs, are Very good small liberal arts colleges, with Tufts being the outlier as a more STEM focused university, though I believe Trinity may technically be a university as well.
The NESCACs have done a great job marketing their league and schools. Athletics is a big part of their student body make-up and they use that to their advantage when recruiting.
The Ivy’s are universities, so larger schools than the NESCAC. For the more traditional sports, such as football, hockey, basketball and even T&F, I don’t think the NESCACs could compete with the top Ivies.
The Ivys have also gotten a LOT better over the past ten years, basically since I have started watching them there’s been a marked increase in skill and playing level in the sport I watch (soccer and basketball).
Yes there are IVY teams here and there that are truly terrible but it isn’t the standard.
If you are a middle class kid playing an equivalency sport, your net cost after FA is likely better at an Ivy. Your scholarship is never at risk because it is FA. That is why they are so competitive, even winning or coming close to winning D1 titles, in sports such as lacrosse and hockey. They will always be at a disadvantage for football and men’s basketball because the top recruits are thinking pro careers and national exposure. The ones with academic chops will likely choose schools like Stanford, Notre Dame, Duke, etc… Until the NCAA dropped the Ivy’s to D1AA in football, there were routinely players that were drafted and had decent NFL careers. During my time at Yale, 6 Bulldogs were drafted into the NFL with a few more signing on as undrafted free agents.
I agree there’s zero chance of Ivies moving to D3. The conference attracts outstanding athletes across a wide range of sports, provides a great athletic experience for those athletes, and is well situated in D1. The academic demands at these schools make the competition that much more special. I know in my sport, track and field, there aren’t many competitive opportunities that can compare to Heps in terms of atmosphere and the passion it brings out in the competitors. I’ve been to a lot of high-level meets, all great in other ways, but it’s hard to find a comparison for what competing at Heps is like. Not to mention the talent level is pretty high, partly for the reason @BKSquared mentions and partly because, yes, there are terrific athletes every year who want a great academic environment coupled with a great competitive environment.
As far as the cuts to sports…Dartmouth’s cuts were budgetary and were reversed when title ix issues arose. Brown was worried about competitiveness within the conference, not with other D1 schools, and hoped to concentrate slots in fewer sports. But cutting one of the most diverse sports in the country—track and field—in favor of sailing, and announcing it in the summer of 2020 was, um, problematic and has to be one of the most tone-deaf moves of all time. They reinstated track and field fairly quickly. But in any case, I don’t think there’s much concern within the Ivy League about classification, or a feeling that the conference isn’t properly situated.
D3 sports have wonderful attributes, too, but the Ivy League is doing something different and, at least in the sports I’m around, feels a lot closer to what conferences like the Pac-12 and ACC are doing than to what D3 conferences are doing. (Obviously, it varies by sport).
D3 schools can have one women’s team and one men’s team ‘play up’ – with permission, of course. JHU plays up in lacrosse, Colorado College plays up in men’s hockey and women’s soccer (and they are allowed to award athletic scholarships in those sports). There are several schools who play up in hockey as those were D1 teams when the NCAA divisions came into being.
There are other sports where there are only 2 divisions so the schools are more of a jumble. Men’s crew isn’t an NCAA sport at all so a committee determines the levels and many of the regattas have schools from all three divisions going head to head.
I think there’s also a big gap in basketball.