No children take up sports in grade school because they’re hoping to play in the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) one day. Even if their parents are standing on the sidelines with dreams of the Ivy League in their heads, the kids are there to have fun and be with friends. That was the only reason Andy, a senior who attends a Catholic high school in Pennsylvania, started playing football and stuck with it all through high school.
When Andy (I’ve changed his name and all the others in this article) was in fourth grade a coach noticed him picking up his sister from cheerleading one afternoon. He was easy to spot. He had always been one of the biggest kids in his grade, and he was frequently teased for being overweight. When the coach asked him if he wanted to play football, Andy replied that his mom would never let him play anything that would “hurt my beautiful brain.” But his parents gave in, because they thought it might help him make friends. It worked. Andy made lots of friends, though he wasn’t that crazy about the football part. From the start he imagined himself as a tight end but was always assigned to play offensive line. Coach after coach took one look at his size and told him that his job was to knock people out of the way.
In high school, however, things started to look up for Andy. He finally got to play tight end sophomore year, and through a combination of exercise and puberty he began to think he could play in college—not at an NCAA Division I (DI) powerhouse like Alabama or Penn State, but maybe at one of the 11 highly selective Division III (DIII) schools, like Williams or Wesleyan in the NESCAC or Swarthmore in the Centennial Conference. His parents, who never thought he would play in high school, let alone college, started to believe too. He is a strong student, with a SATs just over 1400, but his parents knew that he was a long shot for an Ivy unless football could help get him in the door.
Andy’s father got in touch with a college friend who is an assistant football coach at a DIII college in Texas. He took a look at Andy’s stats and video and told him he absolutely could play college football, but only if he put on at least 60 pounds and switched from tight end back to offensive line. A year later, after a steady diet of protein shakes larded with chunky peanut butter, creatine monohydrate, and a few squirts of honey, plus daily workouts at a private gym, Andy had gained 90 pounds. Today he’s a 270-pound, six-foot-five-inch high school senior who will be on the offensive line at an Ivy League college next fall.
Although most student athletes do not go as far (or eat as much) as Andy did, thousands and thousands of teenagers and their families make major sacrifices every year in the hope of getting into a highly selective college. The kids dedicate hundreds or even thousands of hours to training and competition each year. Their parents spend almost as much time, and enormous sums of money, getting their kids to meets and games in distant locales. Then there are the trainers, private coaches, club teams, and recruitment services that families are increasingly turning to on and off the playing field.
They need all the help they can get. Even with talent, dedication, and resources, an athlete’s chances of being recruited are not great. In any given year there are about 8 million students who play a sport in high school, but not even 10 percent of them will go on to play in the NCAA. And despite the popular belief that sports make it possible for low-income kids to pay for college, only 2 percent earn sports scholarships to play in DI or DII. DIII colleges and the Ivys do not provide athletic scholarships.
With odds that terrible and costs that high, why do students and families bother with sports at all? Because the chances of getting into a highly selective college are much worse if you’re not an athlete.
First, Crunch the Numbers
The 2019 Operation Varsity Blues scandal revealed to the world something boarding school and independent school college advisors had known for a long time: College coaches have a tremendous amount of power in the admissions process at highly selective schools. They can essentially claim seats in the freshman class every year for the athletes they want. Rick Singer, the admissions advisor who was the scheme’s main perpetrator, realized that he could take advantage of this side door into college by bribing some coaches to recruit students who had not earned the opportunity.
The prosecution and conviction of Singer and his accomplices, including dozens of parents, may have shut down this brazen exploitation of the admissions process, but it did nothing to change the role that sports play in highly selective colleges. To understand why, it helps to look at some numbers.
When most people think of college sports, they think of the Power Five conferences in football or March Madness in basketball. They likely do not think about Harvard. But a quick look at Department of Education data shows that Harvard enrolls more NCAA athletes—almost 1,200 of them—than Ohio State, UCLA, or indeed any other college in the country. The nation’s second-largest NCAA program? It’s at Cornell. The fourth-largest is Princeton’s. At Dartmouth one out of every five undergrads played a varsity sport in 2022. The ratio of varsity athletes to student body is even higher at small liberal arts colleges, like Trinity and Amherst in the NESCAC or Swarthmore and Haverford in the Centennial Conference. While spotting a star athlete on the campus of a large university like the University of Michigan is sort of like seeing a unicorn, at places like Williams or Bates, where more than 40 percent of male students play varsity sports, you’re pretty much guaranteed to be sitting next to a jock in class.
Along with high ratios of student athletes, many highly selective colleges also have unusually big teams. The largest NCAA team in the country is Harvard’s rowing team. Maine’s Bates College enrolls only about 500 freshmen each year, but it still has a larger track-and-field and cross-country team than the University of Florida and the University of Arkansas, both of which have won NCAA DI championships.
To an outside observer, the focus on NCAA sports at top liberal arts colleges and Ivy League universities can seem counterintuitive. But sports have been a big part of the culture at many of these colleges since the 19th century. Yale and Harvard have been playing an annual football match, known simply as “the Game,” since 1875. In 1905 Andrew Carnegie built a lake in New Jersey for the Princeton rowing team.
There is also a financial incentive. Although almost all DIII and Ivy programs lose money in the short term, endowment experts know they’re a sound investment. That’s because former athletes are more likely to donate than other alumni, and alumni donations go up when sports teams are successful. Another factor is the financial backgrounds of many of the players’ families. Providing a child the resources needed to get the attention of NESCAC and Ivy college coaches requires considerable means. When Ivy or DIII admissions officers admit a recruited athlete, there’s a good chance they’re also admitting a student who can pay the full tuition.
The competition to get the attention of coaches at elite colleges has created an entire sports recruitment industry that rivals test prep and private college consultancies in size, complexity, and potential expense. While exceptionally talented players are able to attract attention from colleges on their own, athletes who are merely very good face the same struggle as today’s very good students: figuring out how to stand out.
For decades independent schools and boarding schools have been the most important brokers in connecting athletes with Ivys and NESCAC colleges. At many independent schools there is an expectation that students will play sports. Nima Rouhanifard, a principal at Miami Country Day School and its director of external partnerships, tells me that most independent schools employ a “whole child emphasis” that incorporates sports, performing arts, and other non-academic elements in their educational programs, in the belief that “there are a wide range of skills and character traits that can be developed through sports and translated to academics and more.”
There’s a pragmatic element to emphasizing athletics at these schools too, since sports help students get into highly selective colleges. In order to serve their clienteles, independent schools are increasingly building athletic facilities more impressive than what you find at many colleges. They also go to great lengths to accommodate athletes, including those who compete outside their school’s own sports programs. Miami Country Day, for example, offers online hybrid education programs that can accommodate athletes in individual sports like tennis and golf that require heavy training and travel.
Should You Reclass?
Private schools also have a long tradition of admitting postgraduate students, or PGs, who enroll in a fifth year of high school after they graduate so they can develop as athletes. Dave Morris, a former college coach who now runs College Athletic Advisor, a company that provides admissions consulting for athletes, tells me that some students seek out a PG year on the advice of a college coach. Another common option for buying development time, available only to students at sympathetic private high schools, is reclassing, a process that lets a student repeat a grade in order to be a year older and more experienced when they apply to college. That extra year can be particularly important for kids who play more physical sports, since it can mean an inch or two in height or a couple of tenths of a second off a 200M freestyle.
Zach Kuba, a former NYU basketball player who coaches the Riverside Hawks Select basketball team, a travel club that plays at a very competitive level, and who focuses on helping academically and athletically gifted players get recruited by DIII and Ivy colleges, tells me that every year some of his younger players dream of being recruited not by NESCAC colleges—at least not yet—but by New England Preparatory School Athletic Council (NEPSAC) high schools, which include boarding schools like Hotchkiss, Choate, and Kent that have old, deep connections to elite colleges. The benefits of graduating from one of those schools are easy to see in top college rosters. Just three out of 16 players on the 2023–4 Yale men’s basketball team graduated from a public high school in the United States. At Harvard, only one of 15 did.
Valuable as those private school connections can be, club teams like the one Kuba runs have begun to supplant high school sports programs in recruitment, especially for DIII and Ivy League schools. Competitive clubs that require tryouts and travel for competitions essentially vet players and expose them to the most talented players in their age groups, basically serving the same role for college coaches that the NCAA does for professional leagues.
One soccer player I interviewed told me that her club coach barred her from playing soccer at her high school until senior year. The risk of getting injured in a game against lesser players that no one cared about was too big. The mother of another soccer player, who got into a highly selective NESCAC school despite having an SAT score more than 200 points lower than the class average, told me that club soccer is all that really counts now. That is a big change from when she was in high school in the early ’90s, when a coach from a state college showed up at one of her high school games and told her to apply.
While the days of college coaches scouting high school basketball or soccer players themselves are largely over, there are a few sports, such as track-and-field and swimming, where the value of private clubs lies in offering access to top level training and competition, as opposed to getting noticed by colleges. In these sports, times are what count. That’s why Danielle, who ran track at her private high school in Manhattan and now runs for a highly selective DIII university in the South, never felt much need to join a traveling track club in high school. Running a 12.0 100m means the same thing whether it happens in Manhattan or Manhattan Beach.
At the same time, Danielle acknowledges that growing up in New York, with its multiple indoor tracks, and going to an independent high school and belonging to a club gave her access to year-round running that many high schoolers do not enjoy. She told me that a lot of her college teammates come from the Northeast and Midwest, and they too ran indoor track. She also told me that her parents paid for her to join a gym to build her strength and that the college counselor at her independent school first met with her to discuss college as the end of her sophomore year and immediately recognized the role her gifts as a runner could play in college admissions.
Should You Have Applied Already?
One of the first things independent educational consultants (IEC) will ask potential clients is whether they want to play a sport in college and whether they can be recruited. It’s an important question not just because of the potential advantage it can provide but because college sports recruiting comes with a calendar. Understanding it can be almost as important as having talent.
For many student athletes, the process begins in earnest during sophomore year, when they fill out sport-specific questionnaires on college websites to get on the email lists for camps. The questionnaires typically ask for grades, test scores, a high school coach’s name, athletic stats, and links to social media and video. Often enough the registration link will also connect users to a list of private recruitment companies, like Recruit Spot, Next College Student Athlete, and CaptainU, which promise to help players get their information in front of numerous college recruiters.
The goal of all this outreach is to score an invitation to college summer camp (which costs from $100 to $300 a day) or other campus invites. But whether this approach actually gets the attention of college coaches is questionable. Using one of these recruiting services may fill your inbox with ads and offers, but experts say they may not lead to meaningful contact. The challenge for families, Morris says, is figuring out what recruitment strategy is best suited to a student athlete’s individual profile, including what sport he plays, his academic record, and where he lives. Most important, he says, is playing in tournaments that are on coaches’ radar and reaching out to colleges and specific coaches who might be a good fit. Morris is one of a growing number of IECs who help students and their parents specifically with
athletics advice. There are also companies that specialize in single sports like rowing and softball. Their services can cost anywhere from $250, for one-time basic advice on how to contact coaches and build an online profile, to $10,000 or more for more hands-on, concierge-level assistance.
A young athlete I spoke to named Kirk did not hire an IEC, and although he had been playing club basketball in New York City since middle school, he had not yet connected with Kuba’s Riverside Hawks Select team. If he had, he probably would not have made what he described to me as “a mistake.” In the summer after his sophomore year he went to Ghana to work at a photography center and teach kids how to take pictures. While that might sound like an incredible life experience, it was not a good basketball experience. July is a crucial month for college basketball, because that’s when many of the tournaments and coaching clinics, where students are first seen by college coaches, take place.
A similar thing happened to Calvin, a talented lacrosse player whose high school team won the California state championship his freshman year. Like Kirk, his parents had no experience with college sports, and he belonged to a club team that gave him lots of great instruction when it came to playing lacrosse but provided almost none in how to get coaches to notice the benefits of that instruction. He was at a further disadvantage living on the West Coast and playing a sport the focus of which is on the East Coast. Calvin missed some important events in the Mid-Atlantic and New England because he had to take final exams. If he lived on the East Coast he could have done both or, if he had known how important it was to be at these recruiting events, he could have figured out a way to be there.
Even though Calvin entered the recruiting season late, it seemed he was making the most of it when he attracted the attention of an MIT coach, who told him that he would be happy to support his application as long as Calvin got his math SAT score above 750. At the time he was at 690, but after working with a tutor, he got a 780. Lacking the insight of an advisor who understood the admissions process, Calvin felt sure he was getting into MIT. What he did not know was that coaches at that school have nothing like the influence they do at an Ivy League or NESCAC college. His application to MIT was rejected in December, and now he is still hoping to find an academically strong college where he can also play lacrosse.
A Touchdown on Instagram?
Club coaches and consultants can play an important role in connecting players to colleges, but when it comes to DIII athletics, students increasingly must also learn how to be their own brand managers, social media experts, and digital video editors, all while remaining excellent athletes and students. If applying to college today for most students is akin to applying for a job, getting recruited for sports is more like using a dating app. Andy, the football player who landed a spot at an Ivy, relied heavily on Twitter in his process, using it to find coaches who swiped right on him. If a coach liked one of his tweets, he DM’d him his height, weight, SAT scores, GPA, and a link to a video clip he had edited. If he couldn’t connect over Twitter, he would go to a college’s website to find a coach’s email address and send him an email.
A key component in getting a coach’s attention, particularly for athletes in team sports or anything that’s not measured by time or distance, is the video reel. It’s basically a given now that high school games are recorded, and not just by all the parents with iPhones on the sideline. That video can sometimes shape how a person plays. Andy’s coach had to tell him last season that he didn’t need to push every 160-pound lineman on the other team into the dirt just to get good clips. Once upon a time, people complained about professional athletes playing to get highlights on ESPN’s SportsCenter, but nowadays it’s entirely possible that when you watch a high school basketball game, players may be thinking as much about their reels as they are about winning the game.
The Pre-Read Is Essential
If all goes well for a student in the long process of competing, navigating opportunities, and promoting herself, a DIII or Ivy coach will become interested and ask her to send in an academic transcript so the admissions office can give it a pre-read. Sports matter a lot at NESCAC and Ivy colleges, but there is a limit. Even the most influential coach can’t just pick an athlete who doesn’t have the grades.
Admissions officers typically look at the academic transcripts of recommended athletes in the spring of their junior years or the summer before their senior years. If they like what they see, they send students a “likely letter” or make a phone call indicating that they’re likely to be admitted. Pre-reads explain why the admission rate for recruited athletes at Harvard (86 percent) is so incredibly high: Most have essentially been accepted before they fill out an application. If they were not likely to get in, the admissions office would have told the coach to tell them not to apply.
The team’s head coach will also usually call a recruit after a successful pre-read, sometimes pressuring him to apply early decision. Unlike DI and DII schools, DIII and Ivy colleges are not allowed to use commit letters, in which students essentially sign a contract saying they will play at the school. As a result, most highly selective liberal arts colleges and Ivy League universities rely on early application plans to secure athletes. At some colleges that means huge portions of the class are taken through early decision. In 2020 Bates College enrolled 81 percent of its class through the early decision process, a shocking number that makes a little more sense once you recall that more than 40 percent of its students play a varsity sport.
People who work in college admissions often repeat the saying “Talent is evenly distributed. Opportunity is not.” Sports may prove that point even better than academics. During his recruiting process Andy noticed that many fellow prospects he met on Ivy League campus visits were postgrads at independent high schools or boarding schools. Most were working with independent counselors. “It made me realize how lucky I was to have a family friend who could tell us the best strategy for getting recruited and help me reach out to coaches,” he says.
He also acknowledges how fortunate he was that his parents could afford the private gym where he went to lift several times a week alongside DI football players likely to end up in the NFL, and that they had the time and money to take him to visiting days at about a dozen colleges, sometimes more than once. The only unlucky part, he says, has been all the peanut butter and protein powder shakes. “I worked hard early in high school to lose weight, and it still feels weird to be packing on the pounds.”
This story appears in the May 2024 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
James S. Murphy writes about higher education. His work has been featured in prominent national magazines and newspapers.
