@AsleepAtTheWheel, those statistics were in the very first handout my son received from his high school athletic department when he signed up as interested in football while in 8th grade. The very clear message was don’t focus on the couple dozen seniors at the signing day ceremony, because the odds are way against you. Play your sport because you want to, not because you (or your parents) think it is a golden ticket to college. I liked it so much I gave the handout to all my baseball parents and my daughter’s JO coach. Much to the JO coach’s credit, she passed it around with a note saying that while her club had a fair degree of success in matching girls with colleges, nothing was ever guaranteed. Plenty of travel and club coaches I have known over the years would never disseminate statistics like that, because they keep the lights on with families who are chasing the brass ring.
@bluewater2015, agree on all points. My daughter played JO for awhile, although I doubt that any of us ever thought she would play in college. She just liked the sport and we could afford it. As she got older and the time committment/costs got higher, she phased out and began spending my money on other things, lol. She still keeps in touch with many of the girls from her old club, and interestingly one maybe two of them will be D1 scholarship players on a team of maybe 13-15. So the numbers are probably pretty close.
Rowing and squash (and other sports) were not included as not enough high schools sponsor teams in those sports and most go from a club team to a college team. The chart was measuring how many high school students go on to play in college. Even hockey is hard to measure as a lot of states don’t have a strong high school team pool, but do have club teams. A lot of high school hockey players go to boarding schools or play on the club circuit in other states.
We had 4 women’s rowers sign NLI but our school didn’t have a team, and there were two male rowers too, but that’s not an NCAA sport so they weren’t counted in either the high school stats or the college ones.
@ct1417, my son’s former school also pumps a ton of kids into college. My understanding is most of the real elite hockey kids play juniors for a year or two before college. I assume that skews the numbers somewhat.
I think the NCAA is trying to account for some of the variation caused by the club system, which is why the data are in part estimates from surveys.
That said, certainly some sports are not included simply because of the limited pool of participants.
As far as crew, men’s crew is not an NCAA sport because of Title IX. Women’s crew is one of the few places where colleges can find a number of equivalencies to catch up with football. If a college sponsored a men’s team, at best you would have close to a set off and colleges would need to find another source to set off some of the 85 counters from football.
Not to get too far afield, but another complication in the percentages is that some sports (tennis and ice hockey are two that come to mind) have a lot of international athletes playing in US colleges, and other sports are almost all US kids. The percentages are probably more accurate where the pool is mostly in the US, unless there is some kind of adjustment for that.
Regardless, the key point is still that in most sports, the odds are long.
@Ohiodad51 I think your daughter’s experience is probably pretty common. It seems like a lot of these clubs have plenty of girls interested in playing up through 15 or 16, then the numbers start to drop substantially at ages 17 and 18.
Men’s crew is not an NCAA sport because the men choose not to make it one. It’s been that way since long before Title IX. It could become an NCAA sport and limit the number of scholarships to 5 and not disrupt the Title IX balance that much. NCAA does all kinds of things like have more women’s gymnastics scholarships than men’s (and women’s are a headcount sport).
D’s school has both men’s and women’s crew, and the women have NCAA scholarships while the men just have school scholarships for crew. Since the athletic director is the men’s coach and it was the first team the school had, it is a well funded and well supported team. Title IX only requires that the percentage of men’s to women’s sports and the scholarships be proportional to the ratios at the school, so at D’s school (75men/25 women ratio ), the men’s teams do have a lot more money to spend on the male sports. They also have a lot of international athletes (crew, soccer, baseball, golf).
@bluewater2015, I think you hit it on the head. 14/15/16 seems to be the sweet spot for girls. In what I observed, participation seemed to drop as the girls engaged in high school and moved on to other things. Certainly there are far fewer U18 teams in my daughter’s old club than U15s. It seems like boys select out earlier, for whatever reason.
I think that is another thing that makes early recruiting so perilous. There was a girl my daughter played with who was lights out exceptional at U14/U15. She got to high school and became a bando, and I don’t think is even playing volleyball on her high school team anymore. And just to show that this hapoens in a lot of sports, a kid named Danny Clark just decommitted from Ohio State yesterday. He was a quarterback and originally committed as a freshman before his first high school game. I think the difference is that in the larger sports while these early commitments happen, they are not the norm. It seems like in several sports they are more the rule than the exception, which is just nuts.
@twoinanddone, I don’t understand your point about Title IX and a distinction between NCAA and “school” scholarships. I don’t think Title IX limits itself to the NCAA. I think it mandates “substantially proportionate” aid and funding from all sources based on participation.
I don’t think the reason men’s crew isn’t an NCAA sport has anything to do with Title IX or trying to keep the number of women’s scholarships equal/equitable with the men’s. The association just wants to maintain control of their competitions. The women accepted the NCAA control in exchange for the huge number of scholarships schools were willing to offer the women rowers.
Who are schools reporting Title IX compliance to with non-NCAA sports? A school could give merit or need based scholarships to every member of the men’s crew and that wouldn’t be an NCAA violation. Title IX might care, but the NCAA doesn’t. Do they have to include club sports that use school facilities or receive some school support to show proportionate aid? Club sports are sometimes organized and run through the recreation department, not the athletic department, so the athletic department can’t be held responsible if they offer 30 men’s club teams and only 5 for women. They use school facilities, equipment, automobiles. At many schools, the club sports are pretty organized, have uniforms (with school name) and facilities provided by the school, and there is a very organized tournament for a championship.
I’m just going to add that today a friend of my son19’s, a current sophomore, just committed to play hockey at one of the bigger Ivies. Crazy. The kids older brother a senior hasn’t even figured out where he is going to college yet.
It’s interesting that there are a few sports that are varsity at some schools, but not under NCAA. There are also some NCAA sports that only a small number of schools have at a varsity level, like bowling and rifle.
I have just assumed that schools generally follow NCAA rules even for non-NCAA varsity sports, but haven’t really looked into it. Crew, squash, sailing etc. are not big money sports so the temptation to go outside NCAA practices may not be that high anyway.
Schools need to report to the Dept of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights as far as Title IX compliance. The NCAA may aggregate the data for them, but the responsibility is the school’s.
That’s a good question about club sports. I think the answer is that schools have to show equitable access to opportunity to participate, meaning men’s and women’s clubs get the same level of access to facilities, etc. That is a different question than funding (although obviously related), which is also governed by Title IX and basically requires a roughly even split in facilities and scholarship dollars between men and women. There is a three prong test to determine compliance that is kinda complicated, but basically the idea is that athletic financial aid needs to be within a percentage point or two of the percentage of male v female athletes. Spending on facilities is becoming a new issue in this regard. I think OCR recognizes that operating the Shoe for Ohio State football and it’s hundred and ten thousand fans a week requires a different level of funding than the tennis team’s facility for a relative handful of fans, but people are starting to grumble about the absolutely insane spending on locker rooms/player’s lounges for football and men’s basketball compared to the facilities available to field hockey let’s say.
I don’t have the back ground in crew that @twoinanddone does, but my guess is that some sports operate outside the NCAA at least in part because of the Title IX requirements and the interplay with the NCAA’s Dayton Rule, which basically says that if a school is going to participate in one sport at the D1 level then it must participate in D1 for all. This is particularly important with conference membership, where the conference’s rules often have provisions about level of funding for all varsity sports. And yes, there are a handful of grandfathered exceptions to that rule, Hopkins lax being a prominent one.
Practically, the way it plays out is that the Dayton Rule prohibits UCLA say from playing basketball in D1 and wrestling in D3. I don’t know but assume that the PAC 10 rules prohibit UCLA from having a nominally D1 wrestling program that does not fund scholarships either fully or at a particular level.
There was an old exception for four D3 schools playing hockey in D1. When the NCAA realigned the schools into D1/D2/D3 those 4 schools continued to play in D1 just for hockey (and Hopkins for lax?). Now there is a general rule that a D3 school can ‘play up’ in one men’s and one woman’s sport.
To be in D1, a school has to compete in at least 14 sports, D2 in at least 10, and there are rules about number of women’s, men’s, team sports, seasons, number of games against other D1/D2 teams, etc. Some schools just can’t support that many teams so must stay in D3 or D2. If a D1 school doesn’t want to sponsor a sport, there can be a club team for that sport but not a D2 or D3 (can’t ‘play down’ a division; a few do in women’s hockey, but then they can’t compete for the championship). Texas, an enormous school, only supports 20 teams so you can see how difficult it would be for a small school to support 14 sports.
I don’t blame the men’s rowing powers for not wanting to join the NCAA. Too many rules.
@bluewater2015
You are correct! I believe 1846. A long and, as demonstrated by the last Yale-Harvard showdown, hotly contested rivalry.
I’d still say as far as scholarships go, rowing is a better collegiate sport for women. There have been tremendous gains made there. Just look at our Rio Ladies who took Gold!
Oh yes, and that’s true for a lot of sports - more scholarships for women to counterbalance football for Title IX. Also I believe a factor in the declining number of college wrestling programs.
Beyond that, one thing that’s interesting to me about women’s rowing is that I’ve seen some women get admissions preference and/or scholarships with little high school experience in the sport . . . it seems like the demand for tall, strong and athletic women who aren’t already tracked into basketball, volleyball etc. may exceed the supply.
Over thirty years ago I received a letter in April of my senior year of high school from the Harvard crew team coach. The letter stated that although I had no rowing expreience, the coach noted that I was 6’3" and had participated in other high school sports, and he thought I should give the Harvard crew team a shot.
The only problem? Earlier, in March, I’d received a letter from Harvard Admissions informing me that I’d been rejected. The letter from the crew coach added a bit of insult to injury.
