‘Exclusive Bubble’
Crew isn’t the only sport that provides an exclusive route into top universities. Several sports that are in demand at elite colleges, such as fencing, aren’t widely offered in high school. Even common sports like track and field have events that aren’t usually contested at the secondary level but college coaches love to recruit for.
“Pole vaulting is a very exclusive event because not all high schools have a coach with the knowledge,” Hextrum said. “That can become its own exclusive bubble within the track world, as something harder to gain access to [in high school] but easier to get access to college."
Many recruited athletes do come from modest backgrounds, but it’s less common in expensive sports like crew. Almost three-quarters of women rowers are white, NCAA data show, while just 2 percent are black. (The sports body doesn’t publish data on male rowers.)
In the world of crew, Ricardo Pantaleon is an outlier. Nine years old when his family moved to New York from the Dominican Republic, he grew up dreaming of being recruited to play baseball in college. Those plans changed when his sister came home from school one day with a flyer for a crew program for low-income families in New York.
Quit Baseball
“I had no idea what rowing was,” said Pantaleon, 19. “I knew it was a water sport, but that was pretty much it.”
His mom encouraged him to go to tryouts for the nonprofit program, called Row New York, and he made the team. A few months later Pantaleon, an eighth-grader at the time, decided to quit baseball and row crew full-time because he thought he had a better shot of using it to go to college.
Pantaleon is now a sophomore at Columbia University on the men’s lightweight team. The coaches gave him “soft support” in the admissions process and Pantaleon said he isn’t clear what that meant for his application. “You never know with college admissions," he said.
Most of the teams Pantaleon met in the college recruiting process were exclusively white, which is one of the reasons why Columbia was more appealing.
“We have a few Hispanic kids and two kids from India,” he said. “I would say this is probably one of the most diverse teams for lightweight rowing, which is awesome.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.