by Tori Lieberman ’26,
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER
Athletes at Hamilton work their entire lives in order to get to a level to compete in college. But, at a D-III school like Hamilton, how that athletic skill affects their admissions process is not clear.
The Spectator
investi- gated whether admissions grants an unfair advantage to student-athletes, and, given the financial and social barriers to participation insports, whether that could make Hamilton’s recruited athletes whiter and wealthier than the rest of their class.
Hamilton is a member of the North Eastern Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC), which governs the College’s rules for athletic recruitment. On the conference’s website, they state that “NESCAC is committed first and foremost to academic excellence, and has established common practices to keep athletics strong and in proportion to the aca- demic mission of the member institutions.” Admissions offices work closely with athlet- ic departments to ensure that students on all intercollegiate NESCAC teams are representative of each institution’s student body and are admitted with the expectation of their full participation in the life of the college.” However, this outlook can result in teams which heavily rely on recruits from private and parochial schools. Monica Inzer, the Vice President for Enrollment Management, and Jon Hind ’80, Director of Athletics, expressed surprise when informed that 21 out of the 28 members of the Men’s Hockey team attended a private or parochial school at some point during their high school careers.
“I don’t think that’s true,” Inzer said when provided with the above statistic. “That surprises me having read their applications because it’s such an international [group]. A lot of them go to schools in Canada. Are you sure they’re private schools?”
The hockey team is not the only team from whom the vast majority of athletes come from private schools. 14 out of 15 members of the Men’s Basketball team attended a private or parochial school during high school, while 12 of 14 athletes on the Men’s and Women’s Squash Teams went to private high schools. While some other teams are more balanced in terms of public school representation, there is clearly a trend that points to at least a passive favoring of private schools on some Hamilton athletic teams.
Hind emphasized that despite these trends of overrepresentation, “One of the marvelous things about Hamilton is the fact that we’re needblind. We don’t get fixated at all on private, public, parochial, prep,” said Hind. “We’re focused on student athletes who are admissible and who are good at their sport.”
“The financial aid for us is something that we are never involved in,” said Adam Stockwell, the Head Coach of the Men’s Bas- ketball Team and the only coach who would agree to comment on this story. “I know we’ve had some guys who were doing very very well and I know we’ve had some guys who had nothing. From a recruiting perspective, that’s got no impact on us.”
Inzer also added that one should not “assume that because someone goes to a private school that they’re affluent,” said Inzer. “There’s a lot of financial aid in private high schools, particularly for students they’re re- cruiting for athletics because they want to have socioeconomic diversity.”
John Myles ’24, a captain of the Men’s Rowing team, sees the effect that private school dominance has on his own team. “The majority of students who were recruited [for rowing] went to prep schools and had access to the sport of rowing due to the fact that they went to prep schools.” Myles continued, “Within athletics at Hamilton in general, the fact that we draw so heavily on prep schools that are majority wealthy and white means… the people that you are going to get are going to be majority wealthy and white.” Myles also added that this disparity has an adverse effect on team culture for those who do not fit thatmold. “It makes it hard for non-wealthy and non-white people on the team to feel like they are worthy of being there.”
Joe Simeone ’26, a member of the Men’s Track and Field Team, thought that socioeconomic disparities were not a dividing factor for his team, and socioeconomic status was rarely discussed. “Some people obviously might have more than others, and you might see that in the stuff they show up to practice [in],” Simeone said. “We don’t explicitly talk about money all that much, it’s just something that exists…I couldn’t tell you who went to a private school and who went to a public school.”
Some teams are aware of the lack of racial diversity on their teams. “We all know in the forefront of our minds that we are an all white team,” Maizley Tone ’26, member of the Women’s Lacrosse Team, said. “At least, 98 percent of us are [white].” Ravi Travers ’24 agreed. “It’s definitely a pretty white locker room,” he said. “But we talk about these things a lot.”
Teams that are mostly, if not completely, white find it difficult to have diversity in DEI related positions on the team. “We have representatives for [the DEI initiative] but they’re also white guys because pretty much the entire distance team is white guys,” explained Simeone. “We’ve talked about it, we’re aware of it.”
Some athletes have found themselves playing sports on teams that have been almost entirely white their entire lives. “I’m pretty sure everyone’s white [on Hamilton’s Men’s Hockey Team]. It’s something that has been part of my hockey experience the whole way up,” Ben Zimmerman ’26 said. “We’re not re- ally acknowledging [the fact that it’s all white kids] all the time. We had a Black kid on our team at Deerfield [Academy] and I don’t think our team dynamic was different, but I’m sure it was different for him.”
Inzer acknowledged differences in diversity of athletic recruits. “The pool of people that we can recruit is a little less diverse for athletes,” said Inzer.
Hind agreed. “I don’t think it would be any earth shattering news or surprising that re- cruiting for diversity is easier in some sports than in others just by the sheer [numbers],” said Hind. “We try to go to places where we can expand our pool in every diverse way. Are we always successful? No, we’re improving.”
But some students think that the prob- lem lies with the Athletic Department. “Ham- ilton College Athletics is so biased towards wealthy white prep school students,” said Myles. “[Racism] is compounded when you are at a private liberal arts school, and then it is compounded again when you specifical- ly zoom in on sports at that school because athletics in general is not always very accessi- ble.”
After years of hard work and tons of time, money and travel given by athletes and their families to ensure that each student ath- lete is good enough to play at a collegiate level, the college recruitment process begins in ear- nest. This can take different forms depending on the sport. For many sports, athletes would go to recruiting camps to try and be seen by coaches. Hind described how coaches decide which camps to attend.
“A lot of this is budget driven…we have to pick and choose where we go based on where we think we’ll get the best outcome to field competitive teams with kids who, most importantly, are competitive in the admissions process. It doesn’t do us any good to go to a place where no one is competitive admissions wise,” Hind said. “We’ll go to a lot of camps and clinics where we know the host has a lot of the same centered values, so we would go to a Dartmouth camp, for example.” Hind continued.
These camps come at a cost for ath- letes in order to participate and be seen by coaches. According to Stockwell, basketball camps can cost anywhere from $65 to $350 with no financial aid offered.
Football camps may be more optional in order to get recruited. “Schools will invite you to a showcase if you want to go play in a showcase, but at most it’s like $25, $50 to go play. Schools will sometimes have them for free,” said Kyle Bratcher ’26. “I didn’t do [camps/showcases] personally, and it worked out for me, but it’s definitely an option that a lot of people take…but if you want to, it can really only help you.”
Some sports use a simpler process for recruitment. Track coaches, for example, just look at an athlete’s times, which erases many of the barriers to recruitment since there are no travel costs and fees to attend necessary camps.
Tone told
The Spectator
how much recruiting camps can cost for lacrosse and vari- ous fees that come along with it. She said that some camps could cost $600 a day to attend, while others would be as low as $250. She explained additional costs such as hotel fares, food, and other day-to-day expenses. She also discussed the need for clips: “They have thesepeople filming at every single field and you can buy the film for $150 for the tournament, you get all the film so you can send it to col- lege coaches.” For Travers, soccer camps gen- erally cost less to attend, as little as $60–80 a day for a one or two-day camp, while some pricier ones that house potential athletes can go up to around $350.
Equipment costs vary depending on the sport. Tone said lacrosse costs can be hundreds of dollars, while hockey requires skates and other equipment which cost from $400 to $800. Youth hockey especially requires families to spend a lot of money on club sports, as well as travel in order to support their child while playing the sport. Zimmerman explained that youth hockey could cost up to $15,000 a year with travel about every weekend. Football also has equipment costs, but generally not as great as lacrosse and hockey, according to Bratcher. “How much you want to spend on cleats, how much you want to spend on other stuff is up to you. It really depends on what you are willing to spend.”
“We are kind of all at the point now where people want to help us out…but growing up, the financial burden on people’s parents is crazy,” Zimmerman said. “There’s a reason why only rich white kids are playing hockey, and obviously people are trying to change that, but hockey’s super expensive and it’s totally a problem.”
Myles explained that, “No matter how much you repeat ‘we’re a welcoming space [for] people of color and low income people,’ just the fact that it’s an athletic team at a place like Hamilton is going to make it inaccessible or make it unwelcoming.” He continued, “It’s very sad because I’m very grateful for the experience that I’ve had on this team and I want other people to be able to experience that, but I just think that sometimes no matter how wel- coming you might think the team is, it’s still gonna feel inaccessible to people.”
Tone described her commitment to playing club lacrosse while in high school. She would drive two hours twice a week for practice, along with tournaments either to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, or Maryland from Maine every weekend. “Joining a club team you pay a large sum of money, I think it was like 10K for a full year,” said Tone. “These club teams do have large scholarship funds, so if your family is looking to send your kids to play or whatnot but you don’t have the financial means, they do have scholarship money to make it more accessible. However, that doesn’t cover everything.”
Travers also found himself having to commit much of his and his parent’s free time to playing soccer for his club team. “The big- gest financial burden for my parents was we drove an hour 45 [minutes] away twice during the week and then once on the weekends for games …but that club cost, I think, $4,000, $5,000 a year,” Travers said. “A lot of myteammates were on financial aid with the team becauseitdefinitelywasaburdenbothtimew- ise and moneywise.”
Though Travers was able to continue playing club soccer up until being recruited for college, he witnessed friends who stopped playing this high level of soccer because of the financial strains on their families. “I car- pooled with a friend and eventually the cost got too much for his family so he couldn’t do it anymore,” Travers said.
“I went to this camp and the best club in the region asked me to play for them, so I did, at another cost for my parents and more time that they had to put into getting me to and from there.” Travers went on to describe how the benefits of high-level club soccer teams are not evenly distributed: “There was anoth- er friend from a lower socioeconomic status than I was, and he was on financial aid from the club and only made it for a year, and then the next two years it was just me. The biggest thing was that [my parents] had a job that al- lowed them flexibility.”
Zimmerman was recruited from one tournament that he played with a club team. But considering he went to Deerfield Academy, a prep school in Massachusetts, he says that this experience was unusual for recruit- ment.
“The Deerfield head hockey coach knows all the NESCAC coaches. But at the same time, he didn’t help me with Hamilton. It was because I went to that camp,” said Zimmerman.” I think for a lot of kids, that’s not the case. Going to a prep school like Deerfield definitely gives you better access to being re- cruited by NESCAC coaches.”
Zimmerman described the connection between Deerfield and NESCAC coaches: “It goes something like I ask my Deerfield coach, ‘Hey, I reached out to the Middlebury coach and he didn’t respond, could you send him an email and say, come watch my kid?’ Honestly, a lot of it happens outside our hands. The coaches call each other and talk.”
Travers also found it helpful to attend a high school that Hamilton Admissions is familiar with. “Because my club was in upstate NY, my coaches knew the Hamilton coaches. I think that was also helpful because they’re like two hours from each other,” said Travers. “[Ithaca] is a fairly wealthy school district… I was able to get recruited by all these place which again are only places you hear about if your family and school is tuned into that niche of academics.”
Myles had suggestions on how to change recruitment in order to recruit more financially and racially diverse teams, though he didn’t go through the recruitment process himself. “On the coaches and recruiters side of it, reaching out to programs that are more accessible, whether it be programs that are funded by something other than the members or programs that are specifically designated towards low income people or people of color, like actively seeking that out, is really important and a very active way of fighting the accidental bias that happens when you just recruit from the same schools.”
While coaches often reach out to students they believe would be a good fit, some Hamilton students reach out directly to coaches via a questionnaire on Hamilton’s website. Stockwell said, “I would say 75 percent of our students are ones we’ve initiated contact with because we’ve seen them play or someone’s recommended them and the other 25 percent would be students that reached out to us initially.”
If both a student and coach are interested in having them play for Hamilton, a coach will ask a student for a pre-read. This is a copy of the student’s transcript, SAT scores if they submit them, and what classes they are taking their senior year. Stockwell continued, “We have a great relationship with Admissions, so we get an idea of what preliminary feedback would be. It’s pretty generic, not really a defined answer. It just guides us in the direction of the student. If they continue to be strong in their classes and do as well or better than what they’ve been doing and write a great ap- plication then they would have a good chance, but not definite. Then we get a general [idea] of ‘keep moving forward with them because they’re a potential candidate here’ or ‘that student’s gonna have a tough time.’”
If the pre-read goes well and the Admissions Department says that a student athlete is a “potential candidate,” the next step could be for a coach to give the student an offer of support. Inzer said that “At Hamilton, [an of- fer of support] means the coach has shared the information with admissions that says, ‘looks like the student is in the ballpark of represen- tativeness and [the coaches] are saying ‘I’d like to support you in the admission process if you will commit to me.’” Inzer emphasized that an offer of support does not by any means guarantee admission to the College. Stockwellagreed. “Admissions, or that office, makes the final decision on all students.”
The NESCAC Conference’s website states that when recruiting, “The NESCAC coaches actively identify and recruit student-athletes and act as advocates for them; but no coach at any NESCAC college has the authority to offer, promise, or otherwise guar- antee a spot in the incoming class to any re- cruited student-athlete.”
However, this language can get confusing. Though athletes know that they are not fully accepted to Hamilton until their acceptance letter, an offer of support from a coach can give many students a false impression that they are accepted to Hamilton.
“With D-III NESCAC there is a chance that I won’t get in. There’s a 97 percent chance that I will get in and a 3 percent chance I won’t,” said Tone. “So, let’s say, my senior Fall I fail all my classes, and do horribly in them, and just turn into an awful person, and my essay is horrible, they won’t accept me. I don’t know that I’m in until decisions come out, but there’s a part of me that knows that I will have a spot here.”
Zimmerman had a similar experience of being confident that he was accepted to Hamilton after he received an offer of support but before he received his acceptance letter. “When they say [an offer of support] to you, I’m not even sure if that means you’re automatically going to get in or not. I know that once they said [to me] we want to offer you a spot on our team for next year at Hamilton College. So then I say, ‘great, I’ll accept your offer, I’m going to apply ED1 and then for me, I knew that I was going to get in at that point.’”
Zimmerman can only speculate about what the admissions process looks like behind the scenes. “I think when they shake your hand and say we want to offer you a spot, we’re going to support you, it means that you are a good enough hockey-athlete-scholar combo that you’re gonna make it through. I don’t really know what it looks like. I don’t think they’re in the boardroom with whoever’s deciding on admissions being like you gotta have Ben Zimmerman, he has XYZ, but I think they’re kind of doing that…They’re doing something. They’re advocating for their recruiting class of kids that they think have a chance of getting through.”
Travers echoed this sentiment. “At a place like Hamilton, the coaches don’t have a lot of sway to support a kid through admissions. You have to be good enough both ways [academically and athletically],” he said. “They don’t guarantee you admission, period. If I had completely blown up senior year, I might not have gotten in. They can’t guarantee you admission, they can only guarantee you their support with admissions.” However, he then added that “Most of the time that means that you will get in.”
Speaking about the chances of not getting in with an offer of support, Tone said: “It did happen to my friend. They said she was okay and they didn’t accept her. So it does happen. But it’s very very rare that that will happen.”
Inzer did not provide
The Spectator
with the exact numbers of offers of support from Hamilton coaches that resulted in admission offers.
During the admissions process for athletes, admissions officers will sort student athletes based on their academic performance into three bands, A, B, and C bands. When asked about this process, Inzer said that, “It’s not something that we share publicly with students or recruits, and we shouldn’t,” Inzer said. “Others in NESCAC might…but we never do because we don’t want any student to label themselves at a part of the process, so out of respect for our athletes, our students, and to be sensitive, we don’t talk about that with families.”
“[The bands are] an internal system we use to describe representativeness,” said Inzer. “That is a little bit of the structure we are using to ensure our athletes are representative and that we have students at every range [so] athletes look like non-athletes.”
While Inzer described the band system as solely for internal use, some athletes had a different understanding. “I believe it goes by GPA from A, B and C. I don’t know these spe- cific numbers, but I know you get like a set number of A bands, set number B bands, set number of C bands,” said Bratcher. “You get more A and B bands than you get C bands. In each recruiting class, you can only have an X number of C bands. So you only have like a couple of these, but then you’ll have more of the As and Bs.” Bratcher added that, “I think A bands are kids that have a really good chance of getting into the school by them- selves without coaches support.”
Tone echoed this sentiment. “It tells your coach if you need a lot of support, a lit- tle bit of support or you can just get in by yourself,” said Tone. “Coaches have a specific number of bands they can pull.”
Zimmerman noted that coaches don’t generally tell athletes what band they are in. “I didn’t get told I was an A band, B band or C band because I don’t think they tell us anymore.”
When asked if he knew if his coach was allowed to admit some C and B band athletes, Zimmerman replied: “Yes, but then again, what’s a C band to us is different then what’s a C band to Trinity or what’s a C band to Utica. It’s harder at NESCAC schools than it is at Harvard or Cornell, not because the school is better, but just because it’s a smaller school, so you can’t hide. Everyone on our team has to be up to a certain standard.”
However, sometimes the tie to academic rigor can lead to the lower bands being the brunt of a joke. “There’s a couple kids who will make fun of themselves and will say, ‘Oh, I’m the most C band athlete ever,’ but it’s not something we really talk about,” said Zimmerman.
Although Hamilton doesn’t hold spots for athletes, there is discussion between coaches and Admissions regarding each teams’ needs for the coming year and their recruitment goals. “[Jon Hind] works with each coach to say, ‘Okay, swimming, how many people are graduating next year? How many students might you need?’” Inzer told
The Spectator
. “You don’t wanna over-recruit and then cut students…In the end, if you look at the number of spots on all of our teams and add it up, it’s about 30 percent of our students who play a varsity sport.”
