Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2006/05/05/tdr_book_review_playing_the_game.php

TDR Book Review: Playing the Game

Friday, May 5, 2006

The game is constantly changing within college athletics. Years ago, Dartmouth College would enroll roughly 500 eligible football players who would be weeded out until only the best, most committed players remained to compete in games. Now, with changes in college athletics and admissions, Dartmouth can no longer afford to recruit in droves. Dartmouth Football recruits just thirty students every year out of a pool of millions of potential high school athletes across the country.

While athletic recruitment at any Division I school is a complex process, no conference in the country has more stringent regulations than the Ivy League, a collegiate athletic conference chartered in the 1950’s, nominally to combat the encroachment of athletic interests upon academic pursuits. Unlike other Division I schools, the Ivy League prohibits athletic scholarships. Instead, Ivy League schools tempt potential athletes into attending with financial aid packages and, of course, a world-class name. However, these are not the same string-free scholarships that other schools offer, and student-athletes are saddled with menial work-study at college and with hefty student loans after graduation. The Ivy League is truly in a league of its own when it comes to academics, but these regulations makes competing in the athletic sphere a tricky affair.

Chris Lincoln, author of Playing the Game, examines the travails of this Ivy League recruitment process. Once a student-athlete himself at Middlebury, Lincoln intertwines his own experiences with heaps of quotations from college coaches and administrators, while interspersing brief biographic stories of various student-athletes. Lincoln is not a muckraker, despite the initial back-cover impression, but rather, an in-depth examiner of Ivy League recruitment. There are no great revelations or arguments to be made, and as such, Lincoln fills the covers with lengthy primary source material garnered from coaches and student-athletes, and is truly more a “Bartlett’s Book of Ivy League Athletic Quotations.” After reading only a few pages, it becomes apparent that college coaches do not possess the oratory skill of Daniel Webster, and consequently, each of the convoluted quotes is riddled with clichés. Unless you are a serious connoisseur of all things athletic, or enjoy hearing such overused idiomatic expressions as “behind the eight-ball” or “have the tail wag the dog” over and over, don’t expect to be moved by its literary content.

However, the focus of Playing the Game is not tight prose. It effectively achieves what it sets out to do—provide insight into the world of Ivy League athletic recruitment. Lincoln examines each facet of the complex and shadowy process, from initial scouting to financial aid offers to academic regulations.

Because Ivy schools cannot offer the same financial incentives as other Division I schools, recruiters have to be particularly persuasive and accessible. Due to the high academic standards for each athlete, just finding potential candidates is a monumental task. The plight of the recruiting agents, which invariably includes the head coach, is detailed extensively by Lincoln. Long nights, myriad phone calls, and prolonged travel are the norms for any Ivy League recruiter. While Lincoln tries to incite a degree of pity for these admittedly hard workers, one cannot help but wonder why he emphasizes this point so—don’t people within athletics typically pride themselves on their toughness?

It is especially difficult to root for the recruiter when the sales technique they use oddly parallels the extreme tactics seen only in Glengarry Glen Ross. Recruiters use intimidation, and in extreme cases, flat-out lies to coerce students to enroll at their respective college. Because there is no contract of consent system, the Ivy League uses flimsy verbal contracts and things called “likely letters,” which state whether it is “likely” that a student will be accepted to an institution. However, verbal agreements and even a “highly likely letter” are not as binding as the signed written agreement that are approved in other conferences, and as such, last-minute switches on both the students and recruiters ends occur with some frequency. Lincoln criticizes this process with great vehemence, strongly encouraging the Ivy League to adopt written forms of consent to avoid last-minute flip-flops by students and recruiters alike. The employment of the written consent form would, in theory, help solidify the decision making process, but with the current ‘holier than thou’ attitude of the Ivy League, deigning to the adoption of an explicit recruiting contract is an unlikely prospect.

In addition to having a shaky commitment system, Ivy League recruiters have to meet certain strict academic standards for athletic recruits. Specifically, each team must meet a certain grade under the Academic Index, or A.I. An Academic Index number is formulated by taking all basic

college admissions factors into account – relying exclusively on SAT scores, GPA and/or class rank. There is a benchmark number, based on the A.I. of the general student body, which a sports team must meet in order to qualify for competition. This number is much higher in the Ivy League than other conferences for a variety of reasons, including many self-imposed regulations and extremely accomplished student bodies.

These requirements create headaches for recruiters who have to impose high standards on their athletes, and have, consequently, led to questionable tactics by Ivy League athletic programs. One of these oft-discussed, but now defunct, schemes was called “boosting,” wherein the coach, foreseeing the acquisition of talented athletes with lower A.I.s, would include a mediocre player on the roster with a high A.I to “boost” overall team A.I. These unsuspecting “booster” students were accepted independent of their athletic ability, and practically never saw a minute on the playing field. Other recruiting tactics, such as Princeton’s use of more favorable need-based grant-aid instead of need-based financial aid loans (which is used by every other Ivy League school) has reaped a greater number of athletes in attendance, which has unmistakably helped lead the Tigers to double-digit Ivy League titles every year during the 1990s.

As one might expect, recruitment within the Ivy League is cutthroat. Each Ivy League school, already searching within a constrained pool of potential candidates, must compete amongst one another for the crème de la crème of the athletic crop. Lincoln describes the natural pecking-order of recruitment priority already in place, with Harvard atop, Yale and Princeton tied at two/three, Dartmouth at four, and the other Ivies lagging far behind. Top Ivy League recruiters are known to steal solid recruits from lesser-ranked Ivies. Quite often, for example, Harvard hears of a rival Ivy about to secure a potential star, only to step in at the last minute (not surprisingly, those bastards). Not only is the competition extremely prevalent within the Ivies, but the recruiters must also compete with all the other Division I schools who are willing to offer massive sums of money to athletes. In short, recruitment is just as competitive as the athletics themselves.

While Lincoln spends many pages sympathizing with the recruiters, he only gives lip service to the difficulties that recruited athletes endure in the admissions process. Throughout much of the book, Lincoln portrays student athletes in disconnect, as raw material to be harvested by the recruiters, and even goes so far as to fault potential college athletes for taking too much time in their decision to enroll in college while under extreme pressure. It is a difficult decision—as many past and present Dartmouth athletes would testify—to give up a hefty financial package in order to attend an elite Ivy League school.

A recurring controversial issue that Lincoln addresses, but fails to answer, is the frequent occurrence of athletic recruits superseding academic achievers in Ivy League admissions. Countless student academicians (or “eggheads,” quoting one Dartmouth coach), are rejected each year in favor of more athletic, but less academically qualified students. This issue, which will remain controversial as long as recruitment remains in existence, puts into question the true goals of the Ivy League. Are Ivy League schools committed to academic excellence, or to a plethora of excellences, in the fields of arts, music, and of course, athletics? It certainly seems unfair that athletes are actively recruited while bookworms have to get accepted the “hard way,” through a stressful application process that, if approached through regular decision, does not provide a response until months after most Ivy League athletic recruits know their fate.

Athletes, on average, have an SAT score of 170 to 270 points below the general student body, and often (though not always) populate the bottom half of the class rankings. Lincoln tries to dispel the data that athletes are inferior students with periodic self-calls about how he made Dean’s List at Middlebury as a soccer player and by mentioning how other student athletes have succeeded within the Ivy League. In particular, he spotlights basketball player Bill Bradley, who scored only a 485 verbal SAT yet managed to graduate with honors at Princeton and went on to have an illustrious political career. While these examples of simultaneous athletic and academic achievement disprove the belief that athletic and academic excellence is mutually exclusive, they fail to effectively convince the reader that the stereotype is in fact a farce.

In arguing for the deservedness of student-athletes to attend the esteemed Ivy institutions, Lincoln argues a high GPA is not everything in college, which is true. Education, especially a liberal arts education, is not simply about getting the highest grades possible. Athletics, socializing, and other extra-curricular activities are vital parts of a well-rounded collegiate experience. But Lincoln makes the leap to say that athletics are equally important to academics, and indeed that one can learn just as much on the athletic field as the classroom. While athletics are a valuable and important part for many people’s development, and may even be a primary factor for success (Ivy League athletes , earn twenty percent more money than their non-athletic counterparts), the fact that you are able to read this sentence without assistance means that you have learned more in the classroom than on the athletic field.

The defining characteristics of Ivy League recruitment reflect how academics and athletics are so closely linked. Par example, athletics took a turn for the worse at Dartmouth after 1996 when former President Freedman accepted a class of particularly talented individuals, increasing the A.I. benchmark and consequently decreasing the availability of quality athletes that could enter Dartmouth. While Lincoln tries to argue that academics and athletics can potentially live in harmony, they invariably are in tension with one another, for while there are many brilliant student athletes, such a combination is too much of a rarity to fill athletic rosters year after year.

Recruiting within the Ivy League, as it stands today, is a terrifically complex process that involves extensive research and wheeling and dealing. Athletics are an integral part of Ivy League tradition and identity. They inspire school spirit, and countless campus-unifying traditions, such as throwing tennis balls on the ice during Princeton hockey games, or rushing the football field during homecoming, have sprung out of athletic competition. However, athletic recruitment in the admissions process remains a controversial issue – especially in the current Ivy League system where uncertainty for both athletes and recruiters is the status quo.