An article about Squash and how it is a backdoor into top universities...
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And for Sports, Kid, Put Down ‘Squash’
YOU’VE already enrolled your teenagers in advanced-placement Mandarin, retained a $9,000-a-year college admissions consultant to help refine their applications, and sent them off to Kyrgyzstan to dig irrigation ditches for the summer. Still, there’s no guarantee that they’ll get into an Ivy League university. What are you going to do?
Like a small but growing number of parents, you might hand the kids squash rackets.
In an era of increasingly competitive college admissions when Princeton, for example, turns down four of five valedictorians who apply anxious parents are looking for some edge, any edge, to help their child gain entry through the back door of the nation’s most selective universities.
Squash, an indoor racket sport long associated with private clubs and old-boy networks, is so esoteric that it barely qualifies as a back door. In terms of the number of actual spots on college rosters, it might be more of a pet door.
Still, a high percentage of the nation’s most prestigious colleges field teams. Squash pros and coaches say that in the last few years the sport has seen a sharp increase in participation by children and teenagers, some of whose parents seem to have one eye on the ball and the other on college applications.
“Squash is ‘hot’ right now,” said Kenny Scher, the executive director of the New York-based Metropolitan Squash Racquets Association, which organizes leagues and tournaments.
US Squash, the sport’s governing body in this country, has tracked a 20 percent spike in membership among players under 18 over the last two years. “It’s generally known out there that parents are pushing their kids more” because of academic ambitions, Mr. Scher said. “You just hear about it more. They’re taking more lessons, they’re spending more money.” (Private lessons run about $80 an hour, plus court time.)
But why squash?
Parents, Mr. Sher said, like the idea “that not everybody can play it, not everyone can afford it it’s almost like it’s a more upscale product.”
IN an e-mail message, Gail Ramsay, the women’s squash coach at Princeton, confirmed that there are many opportunities for good high-school players. “Not only do the eight Ivy League schools Columbia will turn varsity in 2011 have teams, but there are another 21 of the top liberal arts schools that also recruit from this pool of squash players,” Ms. Ramsay wrote. “I actually feel there are not enough players to fill those recruiting spots each year.”
Parents of squash players tended to be guarded when asked by a reporter about any careerist aspects of their children’s squash lessons. (Q: When are parents
not thrilled to discuss their children’s athletic endeavors? A: When they think it might reveal the trump card that could get their kid into Dartmouth.)
College is not the only reason the game is enjoying a youth boom. In recent years, squash leagues and tournaments have become more welcoming to intermediates and novices, said Kevin Klipstein, the chief executive of US Squash. Proponents have also managed to sell the sport’s appeal outside its traditional preppy demographic. Several private clubs in New York have opened their courts to teams of young people from the inner city.
Besides, it’s fun. But back to the competitive sport known as getting into college.
“It’s no different from playing violin,” said Lise Chapman, a mother of two squash-playing children in Short Hills, N.J. “Extracurricular activities, they all enhance your application.”
Still, it’s not violin cases that kids are carrying around hotbeds of parental ambition like Brooklyn Heights (home of the Heights Casino, a private athletic club and renowned squash factory) or Greenwich, Conn. Rather, it is the long, skinny squash racket once as incongruous on a 10-year-old as a tweed jacket.
“It’s a wonderful benefit,” Ms. Matthews said. “It just helps your admissions chances.”
The idea that squash is a shoo-in sport is debatable, said some admissions experts.
David Petersam, founder of AdmissionsConsultants in Vienna, Va., acknowledged that colleges consider extracurricular activities, but, he added, “to say squash is better than basketball, baseball or Greco-Roman wrestling, I wouldn’t go that far.”
Unlike basketball or Greco-Roman wrestling, however, squash does enjoy a prestige that some think makes it attractive to college admissions boards. With roots in the English public schools of the 19th century, squash conveys an aristocratic quirkiness, a bit like a taste for Sanskrit poetry. More than its preppy cousins lacrosse and rowing, it is also considered a cerebral sport chess in short pants.
But more important, squash, until recently, has been almost exclusively a sport of elite schools in the Northeast. Harvard, Princeton and Yale are traditional powerhouses. The number of schools with men’s intercollegiate varsity or club teams registered with the College Squash Association is currently 65, with 22 of them emerging in just the last few years.
And even as squash spreads, it is often embraced by other academically selective universities, including North Carolina, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame and even small Kenyon College in Ohio. There are now 34 women’s teams; Stanford fielded its first varsity women’s squad last year......
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Long article, rest can be found here:
A game that some parents think could lead to Harvard.
www.nytimes.com
