"As the head baseball coach at Yale for the past 25 years, I have read quite a few opinion pieces about athletes and their place at Yale. I have never responded before, but I feel compelled to in this instance (“Admission and athletics,” Feb. 27, 2017).
As a former English teacher, I found Cole Aronson’s ’18 op-ed [http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2017/02/27/aronson-admissions-and-athletics/] poorly written with absolutely no facts to support his assertions. I taught English at a community college; his article would have earned a C- in a composition class.
I am tired of our athletes being labeled this way." …
This is a tricky issue. There are legit pros and cons about it. It appears to me that many ivies have gradually and slowly reduced the % of recruited athletes (if I am wrong, please correct me), along with % of legacies over the past few decades, to achieve a higher level of diversity. The average sentiments among recruited athletes and non-athletes about this issue also seem quite opposite. There was a Brown student survey about it:
Director of Athletics Jack Hayes: “We need to make sure we are filling out teams and our roster with interested and academically capable students"
and yet, “Scott [recruited track] said she was not even aware of Brown before the recruitment process began.” Not even aware of an Ivy? That can happen, but not, I would think, among “academically capable students.”
I fall somewhere in the middle of the debate, and feel very differently about Ivy athletes and the stereotypical “dumb jock,” for whom I don’t see the value in postponing a professional career. I am calmed by the starting basketball player at Yale who chose to take a year to sing acapella, and riled by the news of college athletes’ behaving badly.
Several of my closest friends played baseball, rowed crew, played on the basketball team, ran track, swam or were on the football team. All of them have gone on to successful careers as doctors, lawyers, scientists, executives and academics. Many of them went to prestigious graduate/professional schools (top 10 in their field). Of course this is not a scientific sample size, and I am sure there are plenty of athletes who struggled in school and in life, but it would surprise me if as a group they struggled any more than any other group that were given some type of preference.
There is nothing like athletics that can bring together a diverse community. Just go to “The Game”. There is something that must be rooted in the primitive parts of our brains that generates almost irrational emotion when our tribe battles another. Any school that aspires to create a community, including an attached alumni community, neglects successful athletics at its peril.
With all due respect, I’m astounded by the presumption that “academically capable students” would be obsessed with the Ivy League. Here’s a reality check: my academically capable student athlete son, valedictorian of his HS, and State and National AP Scholar, was unaware of which colleges comprised the Ivy Conference until his “unofficial visits” junior year. And why would he know this list? He was busy doing other things.
^ @sherpa, please remind me where I said that the students would be “obsessed with the Ivy League.” Let me go out on a limb here, because you can of course refute what I say, but even if he didn’t know that it was an Ivy, had he “been aware” of Brown as an academic institution? I think probably. I found the quoted student’s disconnect notable, perhaps you don’t.
I couldn’t tell you what sports league Duke is in, but I’m “aware” of it, even as a parent. Ditto a hundred other schools that I might not be able to place on a map accurately, but I’m “aware” of them. And your son can probably outdo me 2 to 1.
@IxnayBob - You’re right. I shouldn’t have conflated the concepts of “being aware” of Brown and “being obsessed with the Ivy League”. But I’ll stand by my point, which is a that “academically capable” students who also happen to excel in a sport at such a level that they are recruitable are busy doing other things and often know relatively little about colleges outside their geographic region, except for a few high profile schools.
Back to my son’s case, yes, he’d never heard of Brown until well into his junior year of HS. But when presented with information about the school, he decided to visit Brown and liked it very much. He also met with the Brown coach for his sport, who performed a quick AI calculation and offered DS recruiting support on the spot.
But he ended up choosing Princeton, a school he’d heard of but also knew very little about until junior year.
Do you really believe all academically capable student/athletes are aware of Brown and all of the other Ivy League colleges?
I would add that my DD18 who is just stating to get recruiting attention in T&F was also not aware of Brown. She asked me if it was an Ivy when we got a mailing from them. She is academically capable in the top 10 of her class of 730+ with a 4.0 UW GPA and 9-10 AP classes done or coming. Simply put the Ivy League is not on any list of schools she is interested in. She is pursuing the Naval Academy to run track and outside of that is looking for large State schools with the full “college” experience, Texas, TAMU, OU etc. Much like students in the NE might focus on schools there more than top tier state schools across the country for many in other parts of the country going to the NE for any school is not really something even considered. If she really wanted to apply to schools at that level it would probably be more Stanford, due to being in California. Just a different perspective I think from a teenager living in a different part of the country.
Perhaps it’s geographical, but in Northern NJ, I think so. Even the parents of my kids’ hockey team knew enough about Yale to roll their eyes :)) But, I don’t think that the academically capable kids here would be unaware of Texas, TAMU, OU, etc… maybe not to the extent of knowing enough about them to think they were a good match for their interests or intended majors, but I have a hard time picturing them saying that they “weren’t aware of them.”
I said it before, but I’m not sure that it stuck: I’m not saying that kids should know that Cornell, and Brown, and xxx are part of the Ivy League. My impression was that the kids on the hockey team who were stronger academically, maybe 1/4 of the team, would be “aware” of them, at least to the extent that they’d know that they were good schools, maybe not good for them, but good schools.
Anyway, I have a feeling that we agree more than disagree.
I’m assuming this student’s essay on his college application was more focused than that article. I have to admit, I was so distracted by his whirligig writing style that I wasn’t even able to get upset about the thesis.
My only quibble with the coach would be this statement: In no other area of life — other than the military — are leaders groomed more than in athletics. Patently ridiculous, every area of human endeavor grooms leaders. Are we really to believe that all the non-athlete students are pursuing their interests in leader-less vacuums? I’ll pass on those leaders from the Baylor athletic department.
Any school that aspires to create a community, including an attached alumni community, neglects successful athletics at its peril.
BKSquared was 100% correct when he wrote this line and the coach’s response is top notch - I give it an A+.
I agree I think we agree on just about all of it. My DD was aware of Harvard and Yale (I think most students at any level are)but she really has not spent much time on even looking at schools. She had never heard of Cal Tech or RPI for example and she wants to be in engineering. Just a product of being into her day to day school and two varsity sports.
I think while student athletes are quite busy in HS it really depends on the kid as to how aware they are of these elite schools. At my son’s HS, many of the top athletes are also top academic students (guess that flies in the face of the dumb jock stereotype) who go on to wonderful schools.
As someone previously mentioned, locality may play a part. My son looked more towards the “elite” public institutions such as UCB and UCLA. While my son was aware of the Ivys he didn’t really consider them well into his junior year when his coach told him point blank he would be a good candidate for an Ivy. As a parent I’m ashamed to admit I had always just assumed the Ivys were out of our range not for academic reasons but for economic. It wasn’t until we toured Princeton and were given the FA speech that I then understood they were within reach.
So there are many factors that go into the mix: how well HS educate students and families about the range of appropriate schools, athletic prowess, AI match, economic feasibility, and being able to maneuver the labrynth of athletic recruiting. Every day I am grateful that my son ended up where he did AND he knows how fortunate he is. He also brings an added benefit to his school just as the Acapella singer does. They all do.
Well, what about Yale recruiting 8th/9th graders for Lacrosse? How can this be, when an 8th grader, not having started High School, does not have any HS academic record and likely not any idea of his/her interests.
@IxnayBob - Yes, it’s probably geographical and, yes, we agree much more than we disagree.
If you were to ask his HS classmates to name an elite college to which they’d aspire, few would mention anyplace other than Stanford or Harvard, in that order. That said, this is not an underperforming school; in addition to him going to Princeton, his graduating class sent kids to Harvard, Columbia, Amherst, UPenn, and Brown.
It frustrated me that to most of his classmates (and many of their parents) Harvard was the only one of these schools that held any prestige. I’m being completely serious about this. Anything other than the big “H” and Stanford isn’t on most people’s radar in this flyover state.
As is common knowledge, any recruit for an Ivy must fall within the AI range to even be considered for recruitment. As to coaches looking at middle schoolers…I’ve never heard of it and I work at a middle school that has many talented athletes. Coaches may go to exhibition events but no athlete will be seriously considered until they have an academic record that can be judged.
I’d add that it’s against the coach’s best interested to promote a student athlete who cannot keep pace academically speaking. They aren’t going to use up a precious recruiting spot just to have that student fail out leaving the team short. Coaches need to put together winning teams and there are plenty of student athletes who both excell academically and are strong athletically.
@tonymom - Our smallish HS has 3 kids already with commitments to Ivy league by fall of 9th grade. They got recruited based on summer club lacrosse and soccer. Here you go…just google it…
Early recruiting is especially prevalent in sports like women’s soccer and lacrosse, where some players are being recruited as early as middle school. An analysis by the New York Times and the National Collegiate Scouting Association in 2014 found that 36 percent of women’s lacrosse players who use the consulting firm to commit to colleges are doing so early, as are 24 percent of women’s soccer players.
http://www.gocrimson.com/General/Core_Values/20151007
The early commitment trend in certain Division I sports makes recruiting uniquely challenging for Ivy League coaches. It is an Ivy League principle that recruited student-athletes are academically representative of the student body, and our admissions offices alone make admissions decisions.
