How long has the side door been open for privileged students disguised as college sports recruits—and do flexible roster sizes help them over the threshold?
March 20, 2019
Tom (not his real name) was one of the nicest guys in the Princeton University varsity soccer program. Like me, he was relegated to the Varsity “B” half of the program, playing a schedule that included only the Ivy League colleges close enough to keep travel expenses to a minimum (no bussing to Harvard or Cornell and staying overnight) and that was filled in with nearby schools like Trenton State and New Jersey institute of Technology.
Tom and I were different in one regard: I was a walk-on with just enough talent to earn a spot in the program. Tom, on the other hand, was a recruit. As for his talent on the pitch, well, I’ll defer to him.
Tom’s family lived in the affluent North Shore suburbs of Chicago, but his personality and character were not adversely affected by his zip code. Unlike some Princeton students of considerable wealth and privilege, he did nothing to flaunt his social status or betray any feelings of superiority. I recall one student who detested the food in the campus dining halls, and instead dined most nights at the tony French restaurant in town; and another who complained so predictably about being tired after every vacation excursion to Europe that he earned the nickname “Jet Lag.”
Tom may have shared their privilege, but not their ingrained sense of belonging to an entitled class. Tom was humble, and never more so than one day after practice when several Varsity “B” mates sat around chatting. On that day, he confessed to something the rest of us might have already suspected: that he had not been a standout on his high school soccer team. Somehow, he had been nudged into the pool of recruits for the Princeton soccer program, and was admitted as a scholar-athlete, a fact that made him “embarrassed.”
This morning I read about Lauren Isackson, a young woman who was admitted into the elite UCLA women’s varsity soccer program in 2016 alongside recruits good enough to play for the U.S. and Canadian national teams. Isackson had no competitive soccer experience, a fact that has gotten her and her parents ensnared in the huge college-admissions scandal making headlines this week.
Isackson’s parents allegedly conspired with Rick Singer, the mastermind of the vast nationwide fraud, to bribe her way into UCLA as a soccer recruit. Because the UCLA student-athlete admissions committee required her to play on the team for at least one year, she was given the number 41, listed as a midfielder on the roster, and described as a “practice player.”
All of this got me thinking about roster sizes of college sports programs, because I know that sometimes they’re larger than necessary to field a top-level competitive team. My son played two seasons for a highly rated Division III college soccer team whose coach keeps something like 28 players on the roster. With a limit of 11 players per side on the field at any one time, a roster of 20 to 22 players can take a team through a season with enough depth to cover substitutions, injuries, the benching of underperforming players, etc. When you get up to numbers like 28 or 30, you have players who hardly ever see game time.
This doesn’t necessarily make any given college sports program susceptible to fraud, but it can open a side door for coaches, parents, and well-connected facilitators to try to game the system. When the roster size is flexible and you can add an undeserving player without taking a spot away from a deserving one, it does cheat other applicants whom the college turns away, but without negatively impacting the sports program.
And thinking back to my years at Princeton, the varsity soccer program carried upwards of 35 players because they were able to make schedules for two teams. What that meant hypothetically—and I’m not making any accusations—is that there was plenty of room to stash a mediocre player on the “B” squad without diluting the talent on “A.”
To follow this hypothetical scenario to its most cynical conclusion, suppose “Tom”—or some other student similarly unexceptional at soccer—attended an exclusive prep school or a top public school in his affluent zip code. As adequate as his grades and test scores may have been, they might not have measured up to other students from the same school who also had Princeton in their sights, crowding the applicant field from their school and lowering Tom’s chances of getting in. So his parents, fearing their son’s (or their own) Princeton dreams might not come true, made a couple of well-placed phone calls …
And lo and behold, Tom became a soccer recruit and slipped in the side door.
I hope this didn’t happen in Tom’s case.
But in light of the current scandal, I can see how it could have happened.
And I have to wonder, just how long has this been going on?
Copyright 2019 Stephen Leon