Pulling over from the on-topic thread. I think whoever told carpathia this likely was a little misinformed, and I wouldn’t want it to impact their D’s feelings about a particular school. I’ve been doing a little research recently on collegiate club tennis. I’m the parent of a tennis player who until recently looked like he wanted to play in college, but seems to be reaching the conclusion that the sorts of schools he most wants to attend are the larger publics where he’s not good enough to play. He loves the sport but not enough that he wants to play at the next level so badly he’s going to let it dictate where he goes (he could play mid-high D-III or lower tier D-I, and those types of schools don’t seem to appeal to him, and he’s not quite good enough for the top 20 D-III programs, and not at all at the level of a Power 5 D-I conference). So he’s been talking about playing club.
It’s a completely different animal from varsity tennis. From what I’ve been able to glean, the average club tennis program at a large, land grant public university is nowhere near as good as even a midlevel D-III team. There will be 3 or 4 guys who could have played collegiately, like our S25, and then a bunch of kids who played in high school but weren’t playing USTA tournaments year round, or were serious until they hit 15 or so and then tapered down. A lot of these schools have multiple teams, too, with second squads filled with kids who were only casual players at best before college, so it’s truly just for fun.
It’s possible that at Pitt, which shut down its women’s tennis program in 2019, there were athletes who didn’t want to transfer so played club their last couple of years (and never lost a set, I’m sure). That might have made it seem like playing club was harder than it normally is. But those would all have been heavily recruited, top 150 in the country for their high school class types of players. Any future recruits would immediately stop looking at schools like Pitt the second they dropped their tennis program. They’re not pulled from the general student body, in other words, the way a club team is, so the club team at Pitt will be no better than the club team at Texas or UCLA, which still have varsity tennis programs. There might be a couple kids floating around any given campus who could have played high-level D-I tennis but chose not to, but not nearly enough of them to crowd out others from a club team.