Author Michael Lewis: "youth sports" is a college admissions business in disguise

Yup.

Some sports are...but plenty of sports are popular for kids from all socio economic groups. The college athletes are then the best athletes, not just the ones whose parents can afford the training.

Another point is that even with parents chasing scholarships, so few kids actually earn them that many kids don't even play their sports in college.

Varsity Blues by the way was mostly about parents/college consultants bribing coaches to 'fake use' an admissions slot on a non athlete to get them admitted. It wasn't about kids actually training to be a college level athlete.

I don’t know how you function with an utter lack of critical thinking skills.

For at least the last like 100+ years extra curricular activities have been a big part of elite college admissions. How are you first hearing about this from some fringe YouTube? More importantly, why after hearing something pretty basic info from said fringe YouTube are you compelled to repost it rather than just saying “Duh, my guidance counselor in HS said the same thing, how is this new or interesting?”

This info will come in handy for your six anticipated kids with Svetlana.

It depends on the sport. For sure with field hockey, lacrosse, crew, those sorts of things. Kids lining up to see how can be first to the finish line, in a sport where the training can occur anywhere and that requires no special equipment -- for flat track races, that is -- eh, not so much. Personally, I didn't know any kid who got into the sport thinking about how that would help him for college admission.

This does not apply to distance runners. Distance runners almost always out perform the rest of the student body by a large margin. On the flip side, probably 10% of football and basketball players would be able to gain entry to their current school based on academics alone.

When we come back, the feds move in...and expose a cover up of low income kids using football to help get a college education. Did they use sports to help gain admission? Next... on American Greeed!

Michael Lewis is running out of entertaining fast-paced stories to tell.

Eh, running for sure helped me get into a higher tier college in the mid-90s (think a Duke type school). I didn't start running with college in mind, but ended up being good enough to get looked at. I had good grades but running opened my mind to college possibilities other than my local state school. I got into the best school of anyone in my graduating class. A girl applied to the same college and she had better grades and tired really hard at HS and did everything you're supposed to but didn't get in.

At college our men's and women's team had by far the highest GPA of teams on campus. That's not unusual.

You can tell us which "Duke type school" you got into... Our lips our sealed.

This has always been the case. Also the ivys, Stanford, big 10 carry a massive amount of sports. At some of the Ivys in particular 1/4 of the students are athletes, 1/3 are legacy or special admits. So unless your parents donate a building you need to be on a sports team.

But I coached for a while, the soccer, volleyball, and for sure tennis coaches all agreed that most of their athletes were spending the price of tuition in high school on travel sports.

one joked that a walk on was costing her parents LESS money than travel soccer the year before

Varsity Blues exposed the Ivy League to be what we all knew it to be, complete horse s h i tt

They let in a few smart, choice students, but backfill with legacy admins and rich kids whose parents buy their way into the school.

Right, it's an obvious criteria that is pursued and even gets exploited going way back. Hence why high school guidance counselors recommend it. Private coaching and travel ball have been using the college admissions/scholarship sales pitch forever.

you're conflating. on a high level select you are selected and selected and selected from so much talent, then coached and coached and coached, and the end product is players who can do well in the pros and college. we won state twice. we produce low level pros, scholarship players, a d3 all american, and i almost felt envious being a mere college co-mvp in d3.

no, what you're thinking about is there might be 2 select teams in our 10 team league, who we would drub something like 9-0, that were less talented and organized than an average HS team.

that's your select team where they are trying to buy their way into college. they could say they competed same league as us, but they really should have been a division down.

where the problem comes in is where structure, laziness, or corruptness treats the 2 teams as equivalent. or the recruiter literally gets paid off.

but pouting that it's nothing but a college racket, sorry, bull, pick the highest level of any youth sport. the kid winning foot locker or Nike outdoor is running a d1 time to do it. he's not buying college. my dad's theory was my select played at a scholarship team level in HS. he thought my select would beat my d3.

we could address affordability, duh -- i only got to do select on scholarship. but your thesis is a mess.

also, it was my personal experience, you'd run into some team in the state HS playoffs -- a particular city team comes to mind -- and you could tell they hadn't played select or much organized ball. they had these 2 guys with incredible flashy skill. we thought they'd be awesome if you trained them up. but against a drilled, experienced, organized defense they'd either dribble into trouble, or go in circles. and they'd kind of dribble themselves into exhaustion because they weren't in the same shape we were. they didn't know how fit you needed to be, they couldn't make full use of their talents, and their soccer IQ was meh. they didn't really know how to play a team game.

but they'd obviously beat someone as they'd made the playoffs and won enough there to see us. and i am hinting, maybe with some work -- with a select -- those 2 guys might have been interesting.

but the scoreline end of the day was 6-0. that's what talented non-select does against a HS team of nothing but select kids. so, yeah, colleges recruited us. duh.

like i said, the college recruitment issue is you get lazy or corrupt and cease telling good recruits from bad, or let parents buy team slots.

My kids have played a lot of travel sports, none were 69k a year which is tuition at most Ivys and stanford. Sounds like an exageration for soccer.

Is any of this a surprise to anyone?

Track scholarship to the University of Phoenix