<p>I had an interesting conversation with a friend today. Upon hearing that my daughter was rowing, she told me that at her daughter's prep school, a lot of the asian kids are going out for crew to try to regain their edge in college admissions because asians are over-represented in the top schools. She said that this is also occuring in rugby, lacrosse and fencing and not just at her daughter's school, but at a lot of the top private/boarding schools. Has anybody heard of this? By the way, my friend's husband is asian.</p>
<p>I go to a top prep, i cant say ive noticed this. Jus cause you go out for a sport doesn’t mean your gunna be any good at it. Lots of asians play tennis here though</p>
<p>I don’t know about asian or not, but I was surprised to hear that a kid in Salt Lake City was in Crew. Apparently they row on The Great Salt Lake, which is really not a pleasant place overall in my experience. I assume there is a college admission angle to this.</p>
<p>I’d expect this of prep school kids in general, Asian or not. Regardless, if a kid has none of his own passion for a sport, rarely will that kid ever be good enough to get recruited. I have seen a few cases though where a passionless kid has gotten recruited by an Ivy. I guess it can happen; there are worse things though, especially if this phenomenon is isolated to preppy sports ;).</p>
<p>I would guess that some kids may try to go out for a sport if they think it will help them…that being said…whether its rowing, soccer, XC etc…no kid is going to be that good and have passion for a sport to be recruited if they hate it…Committed varsity athletes put in 18-30+ hrs a week in their sports to get recruited…I think college coaches can sniff out a fake…
kwim (:o}</p>
<p>I didn’t mean these kids were trying to be recruited, just trying to add to their ECs. Certainly a college could see right throufgh this, but maybe not admissions.</p>
<p>This has been going on since I went to school “hundreds” of years ago. There is nothing new here that I’m aware of. HS student have been “padding” their ECs with activities including sports, debate club, drama club, chess club, robotics club, etc…for ever. My guess it will continue. Hopefully they will participate and learn from it. Possibly make it a life long pursuit. You just never know what activity might jump up and grab a kids attention, interest and possible passion.</p>
<p>Recently we have noticed more Asians in our public school go out for sports. I’m not sure, though, how much of the trend is due to a desire for an edge in college admissions. For one thing, unlike in the past when the students were recent immigrants themselves, many of the current crop of kids were born in the United States and thus have more Americanized views than their parents or older siblings. Academic olympiads, chess, violin and cello, tennis, and swimming are not the only viable EC’s for them anymore. Still, since there is not as much of an athletic emphasis in their culture such that they’d have been playing soccer at age 5 like their American counterparts, when they do go out for a team sport in high school they usually do track or football, which are the no cut sports at our school. There’s no way anyone could make the soccer, baseball, or basketball school teams here unless they’d been playing club sports for years.</p>