Quote: (04-08-2013 10:33 AM)Bad Hussar Wrote:
Athlone:
Can you comment on the status of Rugby at the Ivy League? Elite? Mid Range? Low Class?
Rugby is not an officially sanctioned NCAA sport like football, baseball, lacrosse, soccer and others. It is a "club" sport here, and is funded by private donations. That being said, the size of these donations ensures that it receives more funding than a lot of school sanctioned "official" sports. This large amount of funding is in large part a function of the demographic that participates in the game here-they've got money to burn.
At my school, the game is generally played by fairly athletic guys who either weren't inclined or weren't able to excel at one of the more popular sports, as well as by guys who have exhausted eligibility in one of those other sports and/or left the team and decided to take it up (ex: football players after their final football season in their senior fall sometimes take to rugby during their senior spring).
The rugby team on my campus is one of the more fully elite/upper-class sports teams at the school. The roster is almost uniformly occupied by graduates of the most elite private and public schools in the USA, more so in my observation than the football, basketball, soccer or baseball rosters (this is saying something, because all of the teams are relatively socioeconomically "elite" here, for reasons I'll explain below). Rugby guys are, in this way, sort of similar to Lacrosse guys.
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Also, I thought the Ivies had agreed among themselves not to offer sports scholarships to students.
Correct, there are no athletic scholarships in the Ivy League.
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I guess they find a way to get around that, or perhaps they don't offer a scholarship, they're just are more likely to accept students who excel at certain sports.
Schools can still prefer recruited athletes, they simply will not be able to hand them scholarships tied explicitly for sports. This makes Ivy League recruiting a bit of a unique animal: it seeks to compete at a high level (division one NCAA), but has to deal with unique limitations (academic and financial) in order to do so.
Ivies generally have large endowments, so many athletes do receive financial aid instead
if they qualify. Most recruits who have the grades to get it won't meet that low financial bar. For these recruits, the price tag can be a major deterrent. It is not uncommon for a solid recruit to have to turn down an Ivy offer in a sport like football or basketball in favor of an actual athletic scholarship from a less academically prestigious school due to the cost.
Schools like Villanova, William and Mary, and schools in the Patriot League (ex: Fordham) often recruit guys like this. The military academies (Army, Navy, Air Force) also get a decent number of these guys.
Most of the athletes you see in the Ivies (particularly those with smaller endowments and less lay prestige i.e. not Harvard) are one percenters or close to it, for this very reason. They tend to be the kids whose families can handle that extra financial cost of attending Ivies. They are also the students who (as I outlined earlier in this thread) will yield larger family and alumni donor contributions during and after their time at the school, so they are the most prized.
This is why your standard Ivy League athlete is still a white, upper middle/upper class male, even in sports like basketball or football where minorities have a much larger nationwide presence.