MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Sun Apr 24, 2022 9:05 pm
willowglen wrote: ↑Sun Apr 24, 2022 7:23 pm
There are circumstances where athletic scholarships help over the Ivies. . My father was well off and there was no way I was qualified for aid at Princeton, my first choice. He was an incredibly abusive guy so I was not particularly bothered by his complete abandonment of the family. My mother was in ill health and hospitaized. I was a good student and ranked in the top 5 in the nation, so yes an athletic scholarship at Duke was very welcome. I wanted to look seriously at D 3 and Hopkins and Williams were serious options. With high poverty and stress I believed I could win NCAA at D3 without the full time job of being a professional athlete. Again, no way to get aid unless I lived on my own for several years. Not something I had the maturity to do.
Hopkins is just as good if not more attractive academically than half of the Ivy League. And there is no difference between Duke and JHU - all comes down to fit. I was a poor abused geek,, so Duke had its challenges socially but I could not be choosy. Look at sport like women 's XC, where Hopkins has 7 recent titles. Those women are choosing Hopkins over Williams, Amherst and Bowdoin. And they make this choice even though JHU like most city schools is not an ideal running environment. It makes sense to me, though. I am not sure I understand the attraction of Maryland though. For a good student athlete, JHU makes so much more sense.
hmmm, that would be a pretty darn rare circumstance, but thanks for explaining it...would that have been recent? I suspect that (if a kid was mature enough to actually make the pitch), these days the Ivies (or Hopkins) would have understood the situation and made the financial, need based aid work. Not necessary for an athletic schollie...but of course, extremely few full rides go out anyway through the athletic route...much more likely to get substantial aid through need based. Bloomberg's dough has made Hopkins competitive in this way with the Ivies.
My circumstance was in 1980. But having sent kids to Princeton and Duke, they expect kids with parents with upper middle class incomes to pay, even if a parent is bad news. One never knows, but a place like JHU may today be more flexible - I was a 4:05 miler in high school with a 1500 SAT - I never thought I was all that great but I could see a great Division 3 school like JHU being more flexible than the Ivies. My mother was dick, poor and homeless for a while. I liked Baltimore. When I was 14 the most well known sports doctor in the nation, Dr Gabe Mirkin, sponsored a national age group meet (paid for my expenses) which I won at Towson’s then mediocre track. I am from the Midwest, and found JHU much like Chicago’s best asset - the University of Chicago. Dr Mirkin made sure to mention JHU.
I don’t like the prejudice against athletes at select schools. I felt it at Duke, and I believed I could hold my own academically with anyone. My brother, an All American at UNC and Phi Beta Kappa in math, felt the same way. I went on to one of the best law schools in the nation and finished at the absolute top of the class. There again was some bias against me by my fellow wonky law reviewers but they had little concept of the notion that no matter our test scores that dedicated athletes were very very good at time management- a skill that can take you far. Plus, especially in a sport like lacrosse- a sense of keen urgency obtains. I would put a positive gloss on any dedicated JHU lacrosse athlete.
I laugh at the girls in sweat pants snarky comments about the JHU women. Us dorky track athletes back in the day would have been in heaven to have women like this as friends, and would have felt privileged around them, sweat pants or not.
Lacrosse requires toughness and a proper sense of physical dominance, This is not incompatible with being a great student, and for me I hope JHU can rise sgdin.
