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Student Athlete at Ivy's wrote:

My class rank is 05/101. I know my test scores aren't good enough to get in normally, but I know I would get in athletically through the team.

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agip wrote:
Remember that this is not D1 - my experience was that there is less pressure on coaches to win, so there is less pressure passed on to the student athletes.

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lease wrote:

[quote]agip wrote:
Remember that this is not D1 - my experience was that there is less pressure on coaches to win, so there is less pressure passed on to the student athletes.

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lease wrote:


1) It IS D1. What "Ivy" did you attend, that led you to think otherwise?

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c'mon Flaggy wrote:

The OP is Flagpole pretending to be his daughter

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nordicmama wrote:

Ivyguy, I'm calling your bluff. I highly doubt you attended an Ivy.
Doubt away--though why someone would lie on an anonymous message board is beyond me. I turned down Stanford and Caltech to go Ivy.

Do tell us what school it was!
No. I'm too close to outing myself already.

Not only did you make the blunder about them not being Div. 1 (a comment no Ivy athlete would ever make)...
Right--that's why agip, not I, made it. I take it that, with that reading comprehension, you *didn't* go Ivy?

...then you say the bit about tutoring. Two years ago we talked to all the Ivy xc and track coaches at length except for one school (talked by phone only), and asked about academic support for athletes. The coaches were uniformly proud to say that Ivy athletes are just as smart and academically prepared as all the other students.
In our sports, this is correct.

Remember the Ivy League does not allow for more than a small admissions bump for athletes; they have to have almost the same grades and scores as everyone else--especially for lower profile sports like xc and track. Therefore, it the policy at places like Harvard [not] to offer any special tutoring for athletes. They have access to the same tutoring as the regular students do--no more, no less. Not saying the tutoring isn't good, but it's not special in any way. In other words, they're not going to "help" you get good grades, wink wink.
Okay, I see the ambiguity in my post. Yes, the whole point is that, at Ivies, tutoring is available for all (just as need-based financial aid is). And because the Ivy colleges bring in some (not many) somewhat lesser-prepared students--often *not* athletes--for diversity's sake, and are committed to having them succeed, they all (or at least all the Ivies I know) have pretty good tutoring/counseling programs in place--*which the athletes can use*.

As far as the academic counseling, that is mostly about making sure NCAA progress toward graduation requirements [is] being met.
That must vary from school to school, then.

Now the academic services might be different for higher profile sports like football and men's basketball, but there was nothing special for track kids such as you might see at other Div. 1 schools. It's relatively easy to find smart distance runners.
Certainly true. Not all members of track and field teams are distance runners, however.

About how hard it is to manage both sports and studies at the Ivies: go to Penn Relays and watch the various teams. Come back and tell us which kids you see studying in the stands. We sat near Yale two years in a row and those kids all had text books open. The academics/athletics balancing act can be done, but don't let anyone tell you it is easy.
My own Ivy students, at my suggestion, also used to study (at appropriate times) when on competition trips. The Ivy academics can be difficult (experience speaks), but the only semesters I was on the high honor roll were when I was fully committed to running--that commitment (and concomitant time management) improved my grades.

We know several runners at top schools who are really struggling and who wished they had gone to easier schools.
Point taken. But are they all at Ivies? And in any case, is there any reason to think they'd be doing *better* academically, at their current schools, if they weren't running? All my experience, as athlete and coach, goes the other way.

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pqowsk wrote:

I doubt the academics at whichever Ivy you are going to are going to be any more difficult than an average school. The difference between a high-ranked school and an unranked school is the student body, not the academics.

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