'Niche Sports Among Ivy Obsessed Parents'

The The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League–Obsessed Parents: Where the desperation of late-stage meritocracy is so strong, you can smell it -- The Atlantic on how (especially) affluent, white parents spare no expense in pushing their kids into niche sports so they have a leg up on admissions into exclusive (especially) Ivy League schools. The worst offenders are parents on Connecticut's Gold Coast. The story is not only about parents who push their kids harder to do better, but parents who hire coaches, sometimes live-in coaches, sometimes world-ranked coaches brought in from Pakistan, as squash coaches.

Cornell appears twice, once as part of a time lapse composite photo from a 2019 Cornell at Dartmouth women's lacrosse game, once in reference to the Squash and Education Alliance, a program for under-represented athletes that noted only about 50 students each year go on to play college sports but that included standouts such as "Bronx player Jessenia Pacheco ['14 who] was a two-time All-American at Cornell."

Parents want their kids playing niche (especially) sports in hopes that's the better route to admission at the Ivies, Stanford, Duke and other schools of that level. At the same time, citing budget issues and attendance, Brown this past spring, Brown announced the permanent elimination of fencing and squash. Stanford after the 2020-2021 season, assuming there is one, will cut men’s and women’s fencing, field hockey, lightweight rowing, men’s rowing, co-ed and women’s sailing, squash, synchronized swimming, men’s volleyball and wrestling. A Connecticut mom was quoted (anonymously) that the cuts at Stanford were not because of costs but because the of the optics of sports appealing to affluent families. Those families in turn want to escape “the penalty that comes from being from an advantaged zip code. Being who you are is not enough. It might be enough in Kansas. But not here.” The story notes Harvard accepts 5% of applicants overall but as much as 88% of recruited sports applicants.

Author Ruth Bennett says the affluent, mostly white parents are guilty of the same elevation of sports as in the Black community a generation ago:

Ruth Bennett, 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.”

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.

it's cool that in the online version of the story if you listen closely the world's tiniest violin is playing and as an added kick, the child who was forced to learn to play it had to go to bowdoin

Sloane. Her name is actually Sloane.

Sorry. Lacrosse is not a niche sport.

Jeff Hopkins '82
Sorry. Lacrosse is not a niche sport.

lol yes it is even if it isn't where you grew up

BTW, Harry Edwards, PhD ‘73 received his MA and doctorate from Cornell.

Ruth Bennett, 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.”

Jeff Hopkins '82
Sorry. Lacrosse is not a niche sport.

You're kidding, I assume.

Lax is even a niche sport among entitled kids who grow up to be frat rapists / federal judges.

Trotsky

Jeff Hopkins '82
Sorry. Lacrosse is not a niche sport.

You're kidding, I assume.

Lax is even a niche sport among entitled kids who grow up to be frat rapists / federal judges.

Hmmm. Do you have anyone (bottom of the page) in mind?

Jeff Hopkins '82
Sorry. Lacrosse is not a niche sport.

And there was a sentence that said that there is not space for 90 midfielders a year to come into college lax unless the kid is okay running third midfield at Bates or someplace similar that is D3-small and very good not Amherst/Tufts-stellar academically.

There was some context to the story that you could read as: By taking away squash you're limiting white-privilege backdoors into the Ivies. By what, a half-dozen kids per college per year.

There was an aside that parents in the Connecticut gold coast were thinking you could get lacrosse up and running at Stanford for a mere $20 million, one-third what it costs to buy a G6. And that somebody had already done that, a pilot run if you will, with a $16M private endowment at Utah. Makes me wonder how Denver lax got funded.

billhoward

Jeff Hopkins '82
Sorry. Lacrosse is not a niche sport.

And there was a sentence that said that there is not space for 90 midfielders a year to come into college lax unless the kid is okay running third midfield at Bates or someplace similar that is D3-small and very good not Amherst/Tufts-stellar academically.

There was some context to the story that you could read as: By taking away squash you're limiting white-privilege backdoors into the Ivies. By what, a half-dozen kids per college per year.

There was an aside that parents in the Connecticut gold coast were thinking you could get lacrosse up and running at Stanford for a mere $20 million, one-third what it costs to buy a G6. And that somebody had already done that, a pilot run if you will, with a $16M private endowment at Utah. Makes me wonder how Denver lax got funded.

Of course, if you got lacrosse up and running at Stanford, your kids would be accepted without needing any athletics whatsoever. (IIRC, Stanford currently has a very good club team.)

The Atlantic has added a massive correction to this story and is continuing to review it, as it turns out the author has a history of being not credible.

Weder
The Atlantic has added a massive correction to this story and is continuing to review it, as it turns out the author has a history of being not credible.

So like every other Atlantic story?

underskill

Weder
The Atlantic has added a massive correction to this story and is continuing to review it, as it turns out the author has a history of being not credible.

So like every other Atlantic story?

Nonsense assertion.

The Atlantic retracts niche sports article.

Somebody they rely on for $$$ was really, really angry about the original article.

A little too on the nose.

Mamaroneck and Muttontown breath easier tonight.