Play a Niche Sport, Get into Ivy U.?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Canadian universities are more similar than different. I went to one of the more competitive ones, but most would consider the degree more relevant than the school where it was earned. Of course, Canada has a hockey culture. I know a woman whose family owned an arena in a small town. She said the kids who are good at hockey tend to think of themselves as minor deities and treat the arena accordingly.

In the US, many parents clearly perceive enormous social and financial benefits to hyper competitive Ivy schools. Enough to justify spending a lot of money to get pretty good at fencing, rowing, squash or quidditch. Some basically just photoshop it in and the resultant scandals were well reported.

Even still, this article from The Atlantic seemed crazy. And shows the folly of sacrificing academics to be the 73rd best lacrosse player in the region.

Is this article broadly true and representative?
It seems genuinely crazy. Do any Dopers have personal experience with this mindset or the madness?

2

TL; DR. Here is an article excerpt from the article in November 2020’s The Atlantic.

*In 1988, the University of California sociologist Harry Edwards published an indictment of the “single-minded pursuit of sports” in Black communities. The “tragic” overemphasis on athletics at the expense of school and family, he wrote in Ebony magazine, was leaving “thousands and thousands of Black youths in obsessive pursuit of sports goals foredoomed to elude the vast and overwhelming majority of them.” In a plea to his fellow Black people, Edwards declared, “We can simply no longer permit many among our most competitive and gifted youths to sacrifice a wealth of human potential on the altar of athletic aspiration.”

Thirty years later, in a twist worthy of a Jordan Peele movie, Fairfield County has come to resemble Compton in the monomaniacal focus on sports. “There’s no more school,” a parent from the town of Darien told me flatly. (She, like Sloane and several other parents, did not want to be identified for privacy and recruitment reasons.) “There’s no more church. No more friends. We gave it all up for squash.” She says she is working on a memoir that she intends to self-publish, titled Squashed.

A story published last fall by The Daily Princetonian found that the Gold Coast of Connecticut pumps more athletic recruits into Ivy League schools than any other region in the nation. Kids’ sports look a little different here—as they do in upscale neighborhoods across America. Backyards feature batting cages, pitching tunnels, fencing pistes, and hockey rinks complete with floodlights and generators.* Hotly debated zoning-board topics include building codes for at-home squash courts and storm-drainage plans to mitigate runoff from private ice rinks. Whereas the Hoop Dreamers of the Chicago projects pursued sports as a path out of poverty and hardship, the kids of Fairfield County aren’t gunning for the scholarship money. It’s more about status maintenance, by any means necessary.

Or, as the Darien parent told me, they’re using athletics to escape “the penalty that comes from being from an advantaged zip code.” She continued: “Being who you are is not enough. It might be enough in Kansas. But not here.”

The special boost for recruited athletes, known as preferential admission, can be equivalent to hundreds of SAT points. According to The Washington Post, Harvard, which typically admits approximately 5 percent of its applicants, reports acceptance rates as high as 88 percent for athletes endorsed by its coaches. “Parents see the numbers,” says Luke Walton, an Olympic rower and the founder of Rower Academy, a San Diego–based recruiting consultancy for high-school crew athletes. “They see that if their child can get the backing of a coach, they are likely to get in. That’s a shiny object—a fishing lure for parents. They look at that and say: ‘That’s the answer. Sports is the answer.’ ”*

3

That’s hilarious. Must be tough to be an upper-class white kid from Westport or New Canaan and end up at a second-rate school. Like Cornell.

4

Many decades ago, I got into a top 10 UK University with above-average exam results, but excellent achievements in chess.

5

One of our son’s friends got into Yale partly because of his fencing prowess. He seemed a little concerned that he might have taken a spot that could have gone to someone more deserving. His twin got into Cornell without sports, though, so he may have gotten in anyway.

6

It’s not necessarily just sports. Excelling at something somewhat unusual can be attractive. Somebody was telling me they were pretty sure their niece got into [somewhere I forget] because they wanted a bassoonist. High grades and scores are a dime a dozen, but apparently above-threshold squash stars are not.

7

more than a few white guys/gals went to black schools on golf scholarships. It could still be happening. Not many high school aged kids black people play golf. There was a small boom after Tiger Woods went pro but that was over 20 years ago.

8

Sure, but being a top squash player takes incredible fitness and dexterity. Most folks don’t have that. I certainly don’t. I enjoy playing squash. The local university team has dominated at the national level for decades, and I’ve played against a few of them. They were not greatly challenged. Despite top coaching, few will be elite squash players. That’s the article summary - parents are encouraging students to sacrifice academics for an elusive goal. Spend that money helping out in a foreign country, being an activist and entrepreneur… it is easy to stand out when few do anything novel.

9

One of my daughters was very good at volleyball - good enough to play club volleyball for a competitive team in high school and to get recruited by colleges. The were a large number of stage parents who would do anything to get their kid on a more elite team. Two kids in her class who showed promise in softball had pitching cages built on their property by their fathers so that they could practice their pitching all the time. Driving 120 miles round trip to get to the large city for coaching or to play on highly ranked teams happened daily. The difference is that these were public school kids who began with some athletic talent, so they were doing this stuff with more traditional sports. But the single-minded pursuit of a scholarship was there - parents dropped thousands of dollars a year to further their kid’s chances.

10

Reading that article in The Atlantic, though, the goal of these parents and students isn’t scholarships. These are, generally, wealthy enough to afford the full tuition price. And they’re paying a lot to get their kids to the Ivy League level; the article says, “the families of young [squash] players shell out up to $400 for a 45-minute lesson with a top pro at least once a week, and in many cases two or three times a week during the off-season. Participants are expected to fly all over the country—sometimes with only a week’s notice—to compete in age-group invitationals that cost $125 to $250 to enter, not including airfare and hotels.” It also talks about private coaches for the ultra-wealthy. And someone points out that a varsity men’s water polo team can actually make money for the school, because the players come from families wealthy enough not to need scholarships.

11

And that article links to another, related article, from 2018.

12

Nowhere in that linked article does it say that the kids grades or scores are lower because of their elite sports status. It does explicitly say that wealthy parents with kids that have perfect scores are so numerous, and the spaces in the Ivies shrinking because of diversity initiatives, that the sports are the thing that’s supposed to put them over the edge for a place.

That one private squash coach was saying when the kids had a few seconds break for water, their nannies were giving them math equations to solve before they could resume play.

…as a water-polo mom from Stamford, Connecticut, told me, her fellow parents have refused to accept it. Racked by admissions anxiety and the perceived injustices of “environmental dashboards” and “adversity scores”—two methods colleges use to increase racial and economic diversity—they’ve ignored, or failed to grasp, the concept of what this mother, an economist by training, calls “fixed constraints.”

StG

13

FYI, the story from The Atlantic may not be entirely true. This opinion piece in The Washington Post (paywall warning) goes into some of the flaws in the story. And the Atlantic story is now preceded by a long editor’s note.

14

I saw that article and thought of linking it. It seemed to me they were going to quite a lot of trouble over some fairly trivial inconsistencies. I got the impression that the article was a little too close to the bone for some blue bloods?

15

It doesn’t help that the author has a history of plagiarism. And it’s not just some trivial inconsistencies; some of the facts are completely wrong. (Like the twelve-year-old fencer who supposedly got a bloody wound in a match.)

16

It was a few days ago I read it, but wasn’t it someone saying they had not seen blood, never seen blood. Which is not disproof. That said, having seen a punctured jugular in real life, the bleeding is quite dramatic and the description sounds overwrought. The history of plagiarism isn’t helpful, but there was also some effort to discredit.

17

Update, The Atlantic says it was deceived by writer of article.

In a nearly 800-word editor’s note, The Atlantic said that, after it had published the article, “new information emerged that has raised serious concerns about its accuracy, and about the credibility of the author, Ruth Shalit Barrett.”

18

Well, the article did seem crazy. That’s why I posted. I assume the situation remains somewhat bizarre, but was much exaggerated and presented in an overwrought way.

19

Yes, I mentioned that in this thread, yesterday.

Edited to add, I have to admit that I wanted the story to be true, partly because I grew up just outside of the Gold Coast

20

Yesterday. The Atlantic retracted the article in its entirety. Here’s hoping no one is foolish enough to trust Ruth Shalit again.