What happens if you're not Team Quality?

Athletic Recruits
1

I have a kid who just loves her sport, but doesn’t have DI swim times. She is a great student and her academics put her in line for highly selective schools, but these are almost all DI schools. There are few DIII schools with top academics (one of them just sent a rather mean letter indicating that though they were DIII, going forward they intend to tryout only DI-qualifiers).

So her athletic skills aren’t quite in line with her academic ones, yet she really, really wants to continue competitive swimming.

What are her choices please? This is turning into a very distressing situation, having to DQ most everyone’s “dream school/s” because she isn’t fast enough for their swim team/s? Yikes, how backward can you get…?!

2

If you’re not fast enough, you need to get faster or modify your plan.

Since academics are job one, she gets admitted to the best university for her and then she tries to walk on or go club.

She could also try going water polo.

3

sirila, I agree that your daughter’s school choice should be mainly based on academics and fit with her goals and that swimming should be down the list, especially since her times are not currently what D1 schools are looking for. If it does turn out that she can get her times to D1 levels, then that’s great.

The reality is that only a very small percentage of high school varsity athletes end up playing D1 sports, somewhere between 1-5% in most sports. So the vast majority of high school athletes are in the same situation as her although it can be difficult for some to accept. And, some who are good enough for D1 choose not to compete at that level due to the significant time commitment.

There are some great academic D3 schools with sports programs, including in the NESCAC and University Athletic Association, for example University of Chicago, Amherst, Bryn Mawr, Pomona, MIT and Carnegie Mellon. If one of these happens to be a great fit for her in other respects, perhaps swimming might be an option.

As JustOneDad mentioned, club programs are another option and could allow her to continue with her sport in a fun team atmosphere, but with perhaps more realistic expectations in terms of times.

4

No need for distress-
MIT, UChicago, Emory, JHU, Carnegie Mellon, URochester, Brandeis, Oberlin, Grinnell, Macalester, Colorado College, Davidson, and all the NESCAC schools are DIII and have swim teams. This is a reasonable start. What is she looking for academically and otherwise in a school?

5

Others have referred to this, and I will too. What are your criteria for “top academics”? Chicago, MIT, Tufts etc do not have good enough academics for you?

You don’t have to disqualify schools. It is your choice. A choice that thousands of other youngsters who love their sport face every year, and decide one way or the other with maturity and dignity. If a kid really wants to play SEC football, but isn’t good enough, he has to decide whether to apply to an SEC school without playing football or to apply somewhere else where he could play. I don’t see anything backwards about that.

I am wondering how you would like the system to work? If a student who is admitted to a top academic D1 school likes a sport enough, the student makes the team regardless of ability…and gets a certain amount of varsity action thrown in too? I think that would be a bit backwards.

6

More schools-only DIII
Pomona, Case Western, Gettysburg, Ursinus, College of Wooster, Bard, Miami of Ohio, Butler, RIT, College of NJ.
If she wants to do both it is possible.

7

Swarthmore – she could swim breaststroke for the freestyle and be fast enough to swim there. Top academics.

8

“There are few DIII schools with top academics”

What the?

That could not be more wrong. And what is more, the DI schools expect their athletes to prioritize athletics in a way that is not always healthy, or designed to get the student the best possible education. This is true even at the Ivys and Stanford and Duke. If you are a recruited athlete there, you are expected to put in outrageous hours on your sport, do not take classes with labs that interfere with practice, etc. My daughter had meetings with the coaches at a couple of Ivys and came away with the feeling that athletes were expected to be athletes first, students second. She was not interested in that.

DIII schools like UChicago, Amherst, Williams, MIT, Pomona, Swarthmore, Johns Hopkins, Bowdoin, Tufts, Carnegie Mellon, Middlebury, Wash U, Emory - these are schools that have academics second to none, and athletics there are treated in a more healthy manner vis-a-vis academics. You still compete, but you are a student first.

9

Miami of Ohio and Butler are booth D1 but don’t take swim times as fast as ivy’s. Just be glad you have a girl if you are looking for much athletic scholarship.

10

Emory has excellent reputations for both their academics and their swim team.

11

Yes, if her swimming is not tops, she’s not going to swim for Stanford or Cal or Texas or 30 other schools that have top academics and top swim teams. At many of those schools she wouldn’t make the club team if there even is one because those schools are just that deep with swimmers. There are certainly top academic universities that are D1 but have not so competitive swim teams. There are DII and DIII schools whose athletes are every bit as good as DI athletes, and in fact those athletes turned down the DI scholarships because they wanted to go to the DIII schools. The DIII school that contacted you is just being honest that it wants the stats that DI schools require. Many do.

Colorado School of Mines has a pretty good swim team, and it’s DII, and academically challenging. California schools compete in all three NCAA levels and some schools in NAIA, some pretty good schools and some pretty good swimmers.

Your daughter has to decide if academics are the only thing that’s important, or if swimming at any level is important so look around and find a fit that she likes both academically and where she can compete. I won’t say compromise because I don’t think it is a compromise to find a better fit. Both my daughters wanted to continue their sports, so they looked for opportunities to do that. One plays D2 and one plays club; both chose an academic fit as the first priority, but also considered the athletic fit and opportunities.

Make a list of colleges she could compete for, and make a list of colleges she wants academically. Any schools on both lists?

12

I have a daughter that sounds much like yours, Sirila. Her academic stats put her up at the top, but she is a D3-level swimmer. As many have already pointed out, there are many top academic D3 colleges. Many. Our issue is that most of those colleges are smaller, and my daughter thought she wanted a larger university. So you have to figure out which is more important: the larger university, or the smaller, still excellent, college, where your child can swim. This is the decision my daughter is making. But she also knows that at many of these larger universities she could swim club, and has spoken with swimmers who sing the praises of club swimming in college. There are many options out there. Perhaps not the “perfect” fit in terms of the “ideal” college where she can make the swim team. But for us, academics and fit come first, and swimming would just be the icing on that cake. And much of what I have been impressing on her during this process is that there really is no such thing as the “ideal” place to go; that there are many different places where she could be happy.

I think your daughter needs to figure out how important it is for her to swim in college, and whether club swimming could make her just as happy. Take it from there, knowing that she is fundamentally going to college to learn, not swim.

13

As many have stated, some of the best schools in the country are D3 and several of them have very good swim teams. Any parent should be proud if their child is accepted into one of those schools.

Most college teams can’t accommodate everyone who wants to be on it. This is especially true for teams where practice space is limited. Some men’s and women’s teams practice together in modest facilities. If the men’s and women’s team each have three lanes, how many male or female swimmers with different specialties would you expect to be able to accommodate? The problem would become more acute if the athletes vary in ability.

A few schools with large facilities and separate men’s and women’s program do allow anyone who can complete the practices to be on the team. Perhaps your daughter will be fortunate enough to be admitted into one of them.

14

I believe the OP meant to type " There are a few DIII schools with top academics…" meaning showing interest…

There is also a myth that just because a program is D3 that their athletic programs are easy to join. Look at the rosters and who is joining those teams. Swim may be different but in my DDs sport, top D3 teams still can draw national team level players looking for top academics and school prestige with better academic balance.

It seems you don’t usually see the top academic athletes at the top D1 schools (exception Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, etc). Its the best athletes not the best student athletes. Different priorities from both the athlete and coaches at those programs. There is also a big difference between top 20 and #100 D1 program.

Also switching to D3 can also present the situation of no merit scholarship on top of no athletic. So the amount you want to pay has to be part of the decision as well.

15

I’m a swimmer looking at DII and DIII schools. My times are definitely not fast enough for DI schools, but that doesn’t necessarily stop me from swimming if I do chose a DI school (though the two DI schools I’m looking at seem to lack swimming programs entirely).

Some swim programs are slower or faster independent of division level. The DII school I’m looking at has slower times than the fastest of my DIII schools.

Some DIII schools with absolutely stellar academics don’t have great swim teams. Take Caltech. I can break their breaststroke record in my sleep, but getting into the school? I don’t know. Still working on it.

If your daughter is really dedicated to swimming, however, then she will find a team. Club team? They’re everywhere. You can probably find an intramural team in almost every campus who has a pool.

Keep in mind that academics take first priority, so don’t “DQ” a school because of their team, or lack thereof.

16

CalTech should never be looked at as a competitive team in any sport. It’s a choice the school has made not to recruit, and not to be competitive. Not all D1 teams are competitive; some DII or DIII teams will be much better, or an individual swimmer could be a stand out on a not so great team.

Each student athlete needs to decide what is best for him, weighing academics, athletes, costs, and other factors.

17

Hi all – so sorry not to have checked back in on this thread. I appreciate all the responses. To tell the honest truth, hanging out on this website causes me some serious anxiety so after posting, I skeedaddled.

Some of these suggestions are very helpful. Mom23 - yep; same. Of course everyone’s right, there are plenty of good academics-D3 schools. But many are smaller and like one of Mom’s 3, mine is wanting a big, urban school. Plus, she’s not really mathy-engineery, so CalTech-MIT-JH-etc … I don’t remember the rest, maybe CarnegieMelon? – anyway, a lot of them struck me as fairly engineering-heavy and not so likely her cuppa tea. Who knows, these labels are pretty thin anyway, but that’s what’s underlying my question. It must have seemed pretty whiny to some given the reaction – sorry. FWIW she has top grades and scores from an “inner city” school and I think feels something of a chip on her shoulder to go to a ‘high-prestige’ school because so many seem to presume she’s “dumb” being from her school. So those are the broad limits of the search-outline she’s conducting.

A little to my surprise she was quite adamant about not liking SLACs at all. I think just the racial composition of these places freaked her out; she’s used to a very different rainbow-hue. But oddly, of those schools so many of you helpfully listed out above. many are SLACs or techie. Maybe I’m still just making that up; I’ll look again.

Good news of course is it only takes one.

But the other piece here is this: club swimming is totally and completely fine, I think. I guess she/we/I? just somehow didn’t ask the right question? Only she did- the coaches simply didn’t answer any questions, just fired off a form letter. She asked “I know I’m not your calibre but what options might there be for me on campus?” - because she doesn’t know; I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking here, frankly – I don’t even have the language. I didn’t know there was such a thing as “club” swimming, and that it would be different.

Fenway asks: “how would you do it”, which is a slightly hostile way of expressing my own non-plussedness: without the language I don’t know how to say it; I don’t know what I’m expecting or looking for … but I guess the answer is “club swimming”.

How I’d do it is line up all the kids who want to swim, rank em, draw a line at the number you need for your top competition team and batch together the rest in increments to make up successive “teams” of lesser accomplishment. Voilá - a “team” and ‘baby teams’. That’s how it’s done in HS, essentially, with “varsity” and “JV”. But it’s evidently not how it’s done in college at all. And that’s what surprised me; that’s really what I (and kid) was not getting.

So when she writes a letter asking “what opportunities might there be for someone like me on campus” (she said it better than that), I wasn’t expecting a reply like “I dunno, you’re SOL sister”. Because evidently according to you-all at least some schools do have alternatives in the form of “club swimming”, only the actual Teams - none of them even had the manners to mention this!?

And so … my confusion. I was and still to some extent, just am confused by this whole process! How do you find out about club swimming if the “Team” won’t even tell you? So that’s the point, these “Teams” are so elite, they don’t interact, apparently, with those of mere “club” stature. And yet, there may well be such an opportunity on campus … I guess?

Daunting, this whole process still is…

18

I know- this is a pretty overwhelming but don’t get discouraged. I’m not familiar with swimming in particular but in general, college club teams are completely separate from varsity teams. It is not surprising that varsity coaches are not getting back to her regarding other swimming options as they most likely have nothing to do with the club teams. D1, 2, and 3 teams are governed by NCAA and the coaches are hired to coach just the varsity teams. Club teams are completely separate. They may still have try-outs, but team members may have to pay fees to participate and for any equipment, travel expenses, etc. The coaching staff is not connected to the NCAA team coaches in any way and may include students. Club teams can still be very competitive but generally operate at a lower level than NCAA sports. You should be able to search college websites for more info about specific club sports.

My son ran into the same issue your daughter is seeing- he didn’t really want a D1 atmosphere but wanted a large urban school with good academics. Most of the D3 schools were too small for his tastes. He found his perfect school in a D 2 program- large school with very competitive admissions. Your daughter would be better off making a list of schools that meet her academic and other criteria without considering swimming, and then investigating the club teams on that list. It is a daunting process but it gets simpler once she comes up with a good academic list. Good luck!!!

19

Sirila, go to the websites of the colleges she is interested in and look for their club sports. Many have club swimming (including Ivy Leagues). U Chicago is also a D3 swim school that might fit her requirements (and possibly Wash U?). We know someone who swims club at VA Tech (I know, tech, but it’s an example). He loves it. He was a very good swimmer in high school, but couldn’t swim varsity at VA Tech. It is a real team, with practices, meets, and even a club championship meet they travel to. He is finding it very rewarding. And, as he said, while the varsity swimmers are falling asleep in the back of his engineering classes because their schedule is so demanding, he is awake and able to put academics first, yet still swim. Definitely consider it.

20

Just have your daughter search for club teams at each school she is considering. I checked Harvard, Princeton and Stanford and they all have club teams. My guess is that your daughter can find very good club schools at any of her top academic choices.

D1 teams receive an enormous amount of emails from prospects and generally have no involvement with club sports. It makes more sense to contact the club teams where she can make a contribution than D1 coaches who are concerned with recruiting athletes who can contribute to their varsity teams