Word: westerfield
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...this fair? Westerfield thinks so. “Athletes add to the University with school spirit and entertainment,” he says. “Who’s to say what’s more important?” But about 20,000 kids will apply to Harvard this year, thousands of whom never saw a 1,300 on their first practice test, and few appreciate being passed over for a defensive lineman who could barely get into Cornell if he didn’t play football. An increasingly vocal set of critics think that traditional academic considerations...
...competition for those two slots at the academic bottom of the Harvard football team, known as the first “band,” is fierce. “You’re not going to take a marginal player in the first band,” Westerfield says. “You only get two. It wouldn’t make sense.” But if the recruit can score just 20 points higher on the test, he suddenly looks a lot more likely to line up at scrimmage next year. Given his class rank...
...band, applies to Harvard, and the tapes of him on the field as a senior look good, the football team is likely to formally support him. And with that support, his chances of getting into Harvard begin to resemble his chances of getting into, say, Providence College. Each year, Westerfield says, the team supports 50 to 60 applicants, 30 of whom are accepted, a rate of 50 to 60 percent. Providence’s acceptance rate last year was 55.2 percent. Harvard’s was under...
...correspondence with coaches. Because of Harvard’s sky-high admissions standards, coaches leave most on the cutting room floor as soon as their SAT scores come in. “A lot of those kids are not going to be recruitable due to academics,” Westerfield says. “Anyone that has a red flag that sticks out—if he’s not in the top 10 percent of their class, maybe stretch it to 15, he can’t get in. Below 1,250 or 1,300 SAT?...
...above (fourth), while Cornell’s first band consisted entirely of 169s and 170s and its second band ran from 171 to 178. “The lowest we’ve gone is 175, and it’s really 180-186,” Westerfield says. “And we only get two of those kids, they have to be unbelievable players. Penn might get two unbelievable players at 172, and we can’t get them because they can’t get in. And at other schools, the second band...