<p>D has been doing gymnastics for years, will be in high school next year.</p>
<p>Not sure if she will be able to reach Ivy recruitable level by Jr year, but too heat-broken to give it up now. If continue this sport, the 20+ hr/wk load will definitely affect her academic scores, so she will not be able to compete with other non-athlete students.</p>
<p>What to do?! Please, please share your wisdom, knowledge and experiences! We are new to this athlete recruiting business, any comments are appreciated!</p>
<p>Harvard, Yale , and Princeton do not list gymnastics as a varsity sport on their athletic sites. At Harvard, gymnastics is a club sport, and club sports do not recruit.</p>
<p>You can research the other Ivy websites for info on their athletics.</p>
<p>I have a D-1 athlete (going off to college in a few short months) and I would say that she was so driven to excel in her sport that there was no way i could have told to quit in order to get better grades. Even if I had forced her to quit or scale back on her sport, I doubt she would have used all her freed-up time to improve her grades that much (not that they weren’t pretty good anyway). The athletic scholarship is no guarantee, but I think you have to parent the kid you have and not focus so much and so early on college recruitment to the exclusion of having her do what she loves now. On the other hand, if she is thinking about focusing more on academics and you think she really will benefit from it, go ahead. The recruitment in the non-revenue sports is not as big as people imagine.</p>
<p>^^^^ +1. My son is the same way. Running is his passion, and there’s no way I could make him stop. He’s determined to run in college, also. Nope, not much money around. It looks like he might get his books paid for, but that’s about it.</p>
<p>Gymnastics is a whole different ball of wax than most other sports. To compete at the DI level, a gymnast is usually a level 10 or elite. This requires an average of 24 hours/week of training, year-round. At most gyms, this is a 6-day a week commitment. You generally get one week off per year. Most high level gymnasts train these hours for all of their middle and high school years (and often much earlier than that). My own daughter was an elite gymnast and trained 36 hours per week from 5th-8th grade. Many very high-level gymnasts don’t even attend school; they home school instead because USAG (the governing body of gymnastics in the United States) insists on two a day training sessions for elite gymnasts. </p>
<p>As you can see, it is not like most collegiate sports. Nonetheless, it seems most of these girls are perfectionists and extremely organized as well. My daughter did all of her homework in the car. She left school early every day to make it to her gym which was 45 minutes away from our home. </p>
<p>I can understand the OP’s concern. There are certainly gifted children who are able to balance it all. Yale, Brown, Cornell, UPenn, and Stanford all have gymnastics teams. The Ivies are fairly weak in the sport, but they do field full teams. Stanford, though not an Ivy, manages to field an extremely competitive team. MIT also has a gymnastics team which competes DIII. Do you think your daughter can balance it all? There is always a little bit of give in the AI for a highly recruited athlete. What level is your daughter now? Is she truly recruitable (in gymnastics, you generally know this by 8th grade). What does her coach say? Why does it have to be an Ivy? </p>
<p>I would not force her to quit gymnastics if she loves it. She has to be able to pursue what she loves. It would have killed my daughter to quit. If you have questions, please feel free to contact me; I have lots of knowledge about gymnastics and DI (my daughter currently competes for a DI program).</p>
<p>If she is driven to continue her gymnastics, she should continue. Any college admission benefits would be icing on the cake, but should not be the motivation.</p>
<p>Gymnastics does sound challenging! I thought long-distance running was bad enough. It’s also 6 days a week, usually with only one or two weeks off a year, but even those are filled with cross-training. 50-60 miles per week of running, but that amounts to a couple of hours per day, even with weight training added.</p>
<p>Yes…most people don’t realize it at all. My daughter trained from 1-7pm from 5th grade to 8th grade. She decided not to pursue the elite route any longer and dropped her hours to 24 during high school. She still trained 4 hours daily 6 times a week.
She started at age 7 training 15 hours per week. This is the norm for any competitive gym and pretty much anyone who competes at the DI level has had this sort of a schedule.</p>
<p>Our experience with Ivy recruiting (not gymnastics) was that grades and academic stats were hugely important even for - as was the case in my S’s sport - a sport that the Ivies all value highly. When my S, who had a very good though not perfect GPA while taking the hardest available courses at his school, got his SATs over 2100 every school moved him from the “we’re recruiting you” pile to the “we want to offer you a likely letter” pile. And one non-Ivy but exceedingly elite school went from “you are near the top of our list” to “we can offer you money.” Unless your child is competing internationally for the USA, academics definitely matter.</p>
<p>3xboys, thanks for the info, that’s very encouraging to know! Because I think my D’s academic talent is much better than her athletic talent. At least this offers us some hope.</p>
<p>I agree with 3xboys. Without the grades at ivies and elites, you are just another recruit. With the grades (and scores) a better than middling (but not great) athlete becomes a sought after recruit.</p>
<p>For those of you with Ivy recruiting experience, would you agree with 3xboys that 2100 SAT’s are about the line above which the Ivies generally recruit? That is what I would have thought, but we just learned that a runner friend of D’s is being recruited with a much lower score than that (1100/1600), Dad admits she’s not a strong student, she has no honors or AP classes, and is not close to being a national champ or anything either. We were shocked, and frankly would have doubted the father’s story if it weren’t for the fact that he seemed genuinely surprised too!</p>
<p>The GFG: I didn’t mean to say that 2100 was the line above which the Ivies recruit. I think I said that until he passed that 2100 line, my S was a recruit - and he was heavily recruited by many schools. Of course I have no idea what would have happened if he didn’t get over the 2100 line. But I do know that after he passed that line, he moved into likely letter territory at the Ivies and a scholarship at a non-Ivy elite. That said, he is also a better than middling athlete - in the top 25 in the country in his sport.</p>
<p>My son’s advisor has told him he is Ivy-recruitable in his sport. When I questioned his grades (current 3.4 gpa), I was told that would be fine with an SAT (or ACT equivalent) of around 2000. He is at a private college-prep school and they have lots of experience with sending athletes to Ivies, so I do trust this.</p>
<p>I think the bar might even be set a little lower than 2000/2400. In my experience, 1200/1600 is the threshold, along with a 3.5, 3.6 or better GPA. It’s going to depend on sport, college, and athletic ability.</p>
<p>I think it definitely depends on the particular sport, school and the recruiting needs in any given year. The athletes we see recruited here from So Cal into the Ivy’s are all top athletes with stellar academics - 2000+ SAT’s and 3.9+ GPAs.</p>
<p>There are 63 women’s DI gymnastics teams. The top 36 make it to post-season. The top 12 from the regional meets make it to Nationals. This year, Yale came in 63rd, Brown 62nd, UPenn 60th, and Cornell 54th. This is pretty much the norm if you look back several years. </p>
<p>The meet Cornell won (and I think they tied with Bridgeport, a DII team) was the USAG Collegiate Nationals. This is a meet sponsored by the governing body of club gymnastics in the United States (USAG). It is meant to be a venue for teams to compete in the post season who would otherwise not be able to. It includes all of the DII teams (there are only 5, hence they are unable to have an NCAA championship as the requirement is a minimum of 7 teams) and all of the Ivies except UPenn (not sure why). </p>
<p>Congrats to Cornell for winning! Gymnastics is a brutally difficult sport and, even at the DII and DIII (and lower DI) levels, these young women are amazing athletes who have likely sacrificed greatly to get where they are.</p>