Athletics at Skidmore

As promised in the fall ’07 issue of Scope, here are a few extra thoughts and quirks about athletics at Skidmore. Gimme a shout (srosenbe@skidmore.edu) with any thoughts or quirks of your own on this topic.

1 — summer-camp diversity. In recruiting for varsity athletes, Skidmore’s coaches often visit summer sports camps, whose participants don’t necessarily attend the “feeder schools” from which we often draw applicants and enrollees. These kids might never hear of or consider applying to Skidmore otherwise. That’s one reason that the admissions staff and others cite athletics as a diversifier of the student body.

2 — food for thought. Sociology professor and Athletics Council member Kate Berheide told me that an often-overlooked problem at Skidmore is meal and travel money for varsity players. Apparently Skidmore has been pretty parsimonious, although recently it increased these allowances. But the cap is still around $15 a day [--I’m doublechecking on this right now!--], which often has to cover two or even three meals. Berheide says, “You can’t feed an active athlete on that, even at McDonald’s! And you certainly can’t get healthy food.” She says she’s traveled along on a team bus and seen the coach stop at a grocery store to buy food for lunches so that she can stretch the allowance to afford a dinner for her players.

3 — an admissions trend. The article “In Recruiting, A Big Push from Small Colleges Too” (New York Times, 9/11/05) says that as college admissions nationwide grow more competitive, “high school students and their parents are looking for any edge, and an athletic resume is seen as the extra ingredient that can get a student’s name on the precious list” of admits. Skidmore’s student-affairs dean Pat Oles, corroborates that report: “Colleges used to look for well-rounded kids, but now we aim more for a well-rounded class. So we do look for some exceptional talents or experiences in individual kids. And athletes are, by definition, kids with a special talent.”

4 — big fish and small ponds. The Game of Life — the popular book that critiques college sports in the US — made an interesting point about varsity athletes and campus culture: While athletes on bigtime Division I teams are very visible to fans and even national TV audiences, they don’t have a big impact on their campuses because they’re such a small minority of the student body; by contrast, Division III athletes, like Skidmore’s Thoroughbreds, influence their campuses much more strongly because there are so many of them — around 25 to 40 percent of the student body at a typical D-III school.

Check out http://www2.skidmore.edu/athletics/ for facts and stats about Skidmore’s varsity teams.