Want some insight into how the Williams “admissions process” works for elite athletes? Start here.

The injury couldn’t have come at a worse time for St. John’s Prep football player Danny Vaczy, who broke his foot on the first day of football camp in Maine last August.

The 6-foot-3, 255-pound lineman had been counted on to anchor the Eagles’ line last fall, but wound up missing most of his senior season. Finally, he returned late in the regular season and wound up starting both ways on Thanksgiving morning vs. Xaverian, playing offensive guard and nose tackle.

Not only was it extremely frustrating to spend so much time on the sidelines, but Vaczy figured it would kill his chances to play at the college level.

That didn’t happen, though. The Peabody native will spend the next four years on the gridiron for Williams College, following in St. John’s Prep tradition.

Former Prep teammates Trevor Powers, who will captain the 2008 Ephs squad, and freshman Tim Kiely are already fixtures in the Williams lineup.

“I went for my visit last month, and it was the first time I had seen the school,” said Vaczy. “I saw Kiely, but didn’t get to spend time with him because he had a wrestling match. Powers was one of the kids chosen to give a speech to the recruits.

“I honestly didn’t think college teams would be interested in me because I didn’t play at all until the last three games, and really only a lot against Xaverian. Coach (Jim) O’Leary called in five or six of us interested in playing college ball, and right after that I started getting calls. I owe a lot to him for taking time to tell schools about me.”

Once the process of looking at schools began, Vaczy was able to narrow his choices down to Georgetown, Wesleyan and Williams. He had originally thought about Boston College, but didn’t think he could play there.

As soon as he made his official visit to Wesleyan, though, things started happening quickly for him. Williams head coach Mike Whalen offered him a chance to attend school there that very weekend.

“I gave Coach Whalen my word, and we had to make sure my application went through without any problems,” said Vaczy.

Do you think that anyone in the admissions office even read Vaczy’s essays? If so, why? Was there anything that he could have possibly written that would have changed the admissions decision from Yes to No? I doubt it.

Best part?

Vaczy, who has a 4.13 grade point average, intends to major in business or law. He played rugby at the Prep, but will throw the discus in spring track this year.

“I’m just glad that everything has worked out so well,” he said.

Me too. The law and business majors at Williams are amazing. I have no doubt that Coach Whalen told Vaczy all about them.

Rant follows:

Let’s start with the finger-pointing! Who is at fault here?

1) Not Vaczy! He does not make the rules of the elite college admissions process. He just plays by them. I have no doubt that I would like Vaczy and his teammates. Football players and Marines are Ephs of a feather. If he and his future-Eph classmates from St. John’s are interested, I would love to host them for a nice lunch in Cambridge sometime. Especially fun would be an event in April at which I would try to convince the regular decision admittees to choose Williams.

2) Not Coach Whalen! He does not make the rules of the elite college admissions process. He just plays by them. The fact that there are dozens of students in the class of 2008 at St. John’s with better grades than Vaczy’s is not Whalen’s problem.

3) If anyone, President Schapiro is at fault. He, in fact, does make the rules. If he wanted, he could stop giving coaches like Whalen carte blanche in the admissions process. He could ensure that the admissions office actually evaluated applicants like Vaczy. (After evaluating him, they might still admit him, but at least the process would not be the charade that it appears to be today.) He could decrease the (excessive?) weight placed on athletic ability. He could lower the number of “tips,” perhaps in conjunction with other NESCAC schools as was done a few years ago, perhaps unilaterally.

Finally, lest I be accused of anti-athlete bias, please note that I am pro-athlete and anti-tip. Indeed, no one has done more than I to debunk the anti-athlete bias of the College’s 2001 “Report on Varsity Athletics.”

For those who are unfamiliar with how the elite admissions work, Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites by Mitchell Stevens is a nice place to start. See here for an overview. On athletics:

The subject on which Stevens said he was most surprised was athletics. For all the talk about preferences for minority or legacy applicants, Stevens said that the preference that counted the most was sports ability. There are some anecdotes that will reinforce the stereotypes of many academics about jocks. Some coaches would, with some regularity, push for the admission of athletes who were not top students. Admissions officers in the book are particularly critical of the “helmet sports” — football and hockey.

But Stevens also discusses coaches who consistently would come to the admissions office with lists of desired applicants who were as strong in the library as on the field. There were many coaches he saw who put enough emphasis on recruiting the right kind of mental talent that their lists were people who would have been admitted without extra help.

“I would say one of the largest intellectual surprises of my career was to be able to set aside the notion that sports are a pollutant on the main business of higher education and to see sports as part of the business of higher education,” Stevens said. For many academics, “the notion that sports pollutes is deeply ingrained in your identity,” but that’s not really the case, he said.

While admissions officers nationally complain about fending off coaches, Stevens notes in his book that coaches attract much of the (academic) talent because they are constantly on the road, looking for high schoolers who might fit in well. “Coaches may be the people who bug you, but they are also a really valuable part of the whole recruitment machinery,” he said.

How do things work at Williams? Coach Whalen has 14 “tips” in each class, spots he can allocate to (almost) any applicant that he wants, applicants who would not be accepted at Williams if he did not tip them. These tips must meet a minimal set of standards with respect to their academic ranks, but, after that, Whalen makes the decision. If he wants you, you’re in.

Whalen has relationships with high school football coaches, especially coaches at academically serious football powers like St. John’s. If someone like O’Leary tells him that Vaczy could contribute at Williams, despite not playing much his senior year in high school, then Whalen is likely to believe him. O’Leary (or someone at St. John’s) has been sending Whalen good players for years. They wouldn’t want to mislead anyone from Williams now. So, once Whalen checks that Vaczy’s academics are “good enough,” on to the magic tip list he goes.

There have been changes in admissions policies in recent years.

Several years ago, the 11-member New England Small College Athletic Conference (Nescac), which includes Amherst and Williams, adopted systematic restrictions on recruiting.

“The real danger was in not acknowledging that we give preferential treatment to athletes,” Parker said. “It engendered a corrosive cynicism. When it was on the table exactly what we do, it wasn’t as bad as some faculty thought.”

Broadly, Division III colleges are separated into those that use what is customarily called a slots system and those that do not. Slots are reserved for athletes in each freshman class, a specific number that typically represents 15 percent to 30 percent of those admitted. Colleges that do not have a slots system may admit more, or fewer, recruited athletes, but there is no set number.

The New England Small College Athletic Conference uses slots, although its members refer to them as athletic factors. Parker said the maximum number of athletic factors was determined by the number of varsity teams each college fields in the conference.

The formula multiplies the number of teams by two, then adds 14 if there is a football team. A typical total is in the 70’s; Amherst, Williams and Wesleyan University have agreed to a limit of 66. Parker said that as recently as the late 1990’s, Amherst was admitting 96 athletes.

That would be Tom Parker ‘69, former director of admission at Williams and the man, some say, most responsible for Williams athletic dominance in the 1990’s, especially in football. Ever since the Report on Varsity Athletics, Williams has raised the standards for tipped athletes, especially so called “low band” ones, meaning students with academic ranks below 5. The Report notes:

The academic ratings of incoming Williams students – both athletically tipped and all other students – have risen over the past decade. In ’90 and ’91, the average academic ratings for tipped athletes were in the 5.7-5.8 range. For ’92 through ’98, they hovered around 5.5. For ‘99-’00, they averaged about 5.0. Meanwhile, the academic ratings of all other students rose from 3.6 in ’90 and ’91 to 2.8 in ’00, improving fairly steadily. The number of “low-band athletic admits” – that is, athletes with academic ratings below 6.0 – has decreased by 38% from previous levels for the classes of 2003-’05. In the class of 2006, the Athletic Department reports that only 10 “low-band” athletes were admitted, in accordance with our President’s commitment to make our athletes representative of our student body.

I believe that this trend has continued, that there are fewer and fewer low band athletic tips. The 14 football tips in the class of 2010 averaged 1405 on the SATs. So, Coach Whalen has it much harder than Dick Farley ever did. Former Baseball Coach Dave Barnard provides many insider details.

Critics may argue that if “protects,” or ultra high band admits (roughly 1450-1520 SAT range), were included then Williams would fall more in line with the group (the number of athletic priority slots would increase from 66 to 81 if you consider protects to be half of a tip as admissions does). Those numbers were correctly not considered because applicants at that level here are so called “academic admits” (accepted without regard to attributes) at every other school in the league including Amherst. In the last couple of years for instance, 2 baseball recruits rated as “protects” at Williams were “academic admits” at both Harvard and Dartmouth – I know this because the respective Ivy coaches were not aware of the players in question prior to their acceptance.

…

Getting back to our athletics/admissions situation within the NESCAC, while tenths of a slot per team may appear trivial, in raw numbers the cutbacks amount to at least 3 to 13 fewer matriculants than the rest of the conference for an intercollegiate program that fields 1 to 6 more sports than any other school in the league. Among the Little Three, Williams also has the most to lose by not going along with the new NESCAC admissions policy. The hypothetical result of adopting a revamped league admissions formula here would be a gain of 15 slots to 81 (a number close to our yield most years prior to 2001), Amherst would net just 1 athlete to 67 with Wesleyan adding 5 to 71.

Moreover, Williams now has an admit to matriculation ratio approaching 1 for priority listed athletes whereas all other NESCAC institutions can overyield the number without penalty. Most NESCAC schools are permitted between 2 and 3 admits for each athletic slot in the regular decision pool. Until 2 years ago, Williams’ coaches were also allowed to overyield. For much of the 1980’s and 90’s our target number in admissions (72) was consistently exceeded, some years by a dozen or more recruits. So, despite the fact that athletic “tips” (priority listed athletes) have officially only been cut 8% from 72-66, if you consider matriculations, the athletic priority listed number has more accurately been reduced 20 to 25%.

Although neither the NESCAC or Ivy regulate low band (roughly 1150-1250 SAT here) athletic priority admits for every intercollegiate sport (the Ivy tiers football, hockey and basketball only), historically those colleges, including Williams prior to 2001, reserved between 1/4 and 1/3 of their slots for athletes with standardized test scores and grades below 2 standard deviations (low band) of the student body mean. Each year 29% of the recruited Ivy football class are low banders.

In ‘02 Williams matriculated 10 priority listed athletes, or 15% of the “tipped” athletic class, with admissions reader ratings at or near the bottom of the acceptable range - down significantly from previous yields. Last year, Amherst admitted 19 priority-listed athletes in the low band or 29% of their recruited class, a figure much more in line with the rest of the NESCAC and Ivy. This spring, because of institutional policy changes, Williams could accept as few as 5 players in the bottom academic tier. As a result of a preliminary read last winter, admissions said no to a low band baseball recruit that was subsequently admitted to Yale.

Prior to the new millennium, a Williams legacy with good grades and SAT scores around 1300 who had the potential to contribute to varsity athletics was usually admitted without counting against a team’s allotment of priority slots. Now, sons and daughters of alums generally need to score in the 1400 SAT range or better in order to gain acceptance without being on a coach’s list. Further, until recently the “protect” floor was approximately 50 SAT points lower than where it is today (1400 vs.1450).

Perhaps that it is too much insider knowledge for most of our readers, but, unless you understand the messy details, it is hard to have an informed opinion about athletic admissions at Williams.

The Times reports:

Several Division III coaches have said that coaches at slots-system colleges are more likely to guarantee admission to prospects to encourage a commitment, especially with a binding early-decision application.

“I’ve had plenty of kids I’m recruiting call me to say they’ve been assured a spot by a coach,” said Mike Murphy, the men’s lacrosse coach at Haverford College, which plays in the Centennial Conference. “This year I had a kid offer to play me the voice mail from the coach telling him that. Whether these coaches have that kind of power or not, the kids believe it.”

Parker, who has led a committee of administrators reforming the conference bylaws, said coaches were forbidden to assure athletes of admission.

Not sure if those rules apply to Coach Whalen.

Bottom line? Williams used to give substantially more preferences to athletes than it does today. In the 1990’s, the star senior lineman from St. John’s, the fellow who started all the games but had a 1250 SAT, would have been admitted to Williams. Today, he would be rejected. Instead, Williams accepts Vaczy, a smarter student but a less skilled football player. Sounds like a good trade off to me. Welcome to Williams!

Given that Williams is still winning NESCAC championships and Directors’ Cups, it is hard to argue that we give too little emphasis to athletics in admissions, the fears of Dave Barnard notwithstanding. Does anyone argue that Williams should let in worse students who were better athletes just so we could win 90% of our games instead of 80%? I hope not. Should Williams stay where it is or continue down the path that Morty started us on almost 10 years ago? I don’t know.

My own suggestion focuses, unsurprisingly, on transparency, on how we can demonstrate to members of the Williams community (especially faculty skeptics) and to our athletic opponents that Williams athletes are fairly representative of the Williams student body. Williams should make public the average SATs and college GPAs for each of its sports teams, both equal weighted including all team members and weighted by playing time to emphasize starters (and remove incentives for coaches to game their rosters). This would demonstrate conclusively that our student athletes are, for most teams and most practical purposes, indistinguishable from our non-athletes. We could make this information public and challenge other schools to do the same. Feedback on this?