High Admission Standards Limit Pomona Recruiting
By Tamara Zakim
Sports Editor

One glance at the Pomona-Pitzer bench during a women's basketball game is enough to raise questions. The sideline is often manned by more coaches than substitutes, and the Hens' losing record reflects the liability of an eight-player roster. Women's basketball is not the only team on campus struggling to break .500. Of Pomona-Pitzer's ten fall and winter sports, only three have managed to produce winning seasons so far. Hopes ride on the success of womens' swimming to secure this year's first conference championship for an athletic department where records as lop-sided as 3-15, 6-20 and 7-21 are not uncommon.

Small rosters, losing seasons and a dearth of SCIAC championships seem to be the symptoms of a deteriorating sports program. The consistent quality of Pomona-Pitzer's coaching staff, the unwavering economic security of the college, and the superiority of Sagehen facilities to other conference schools yield no obvious explanation for the department's difficulties. As admissions standards continue to rise at Pomona, however, the search for the source of Pomona's athletic woes inevitably leads to Sumner Hall and the Office of Admissions.

The issues of college admissions and athletic recruiting in schools of all levels has sparked nation-wide debate. It's common knowledge that Division I schools admit students based purely on athletic merit. In the interest of nurturing prosperous athletic programs, schools bring in top talent by compromising their academic standards. The recent resignation of the president of Gardner-Webb University in North Carolina highlights the pressure on school officials to lower academic expectations in order to retain their best athletes.

Such scandals have shed light on the often conflicted prioritizing of academics and athletics. The assumption is that rigid academic standards grossly reduce the pool of talent from which a coach can recruit. At premier liberal arts institutions such as Pomona, athletic weakness prompts finger-pointing at admissions. Coaches maintain that their hands are tied in recruiting processes; forced to answer to the college's elite standards, they are given little, if any, say in the athletic talent that gets admitted.

The legitimacy of the claims made by Pomona-Pitzer coaches regarding recruiting is sound. Statistics boast a freshman class at Pomona with a 1450 average SAT score, 84 percent of whom were in the top 10 percent of their graduating high school class. Coaches must accept the reality that, due to the exclusiveness of Pomona admissions, the majority of the talent they recruit will ultimately be rejected. The factors involved in developing a competitive sports program at Pomona are more complex, however, than the athletic/academic distinction may suggest.

The recruiting process at Pomona unfolds in multiple stages. All student applicants are required to submit a "5b form" listing their extracurricular activities. The admissions office combs through these 5b lists and forwards the names of students with athletic interests to the athletic department. In turn, coaches are expected to rank these names in order of recruiting preference and return the rankings to Sumner Hall.

Independent of the 5b ranking process are the coaches' individual recruiting labors. Coaches scout potential players, talk to high school coaches, mail letters, send emails, and make phone calls in efforts to entice talented athletes to apply to Pomona. Each coach compiles a list of recruited applicants; the lists vary in size from sport to sport. Women's swimming and men's football lists, for example, may include as many as 60 names, whereas men's and women's basketball lists range from 10 to 15. These lists, eventually sent to the admissions office, are supposed to be ordered according to talent and potential, with the most promising recruits placed at the top. Whether or not these lists are manipulated by coaches, however, is an issue of contention between the admissions and athletic departments.

Coaches are often conflicted about placing an extremely talented student with poor SAT scores or average grades at the top of their recruiting lists because of the high probability that such applicants will be turned down.

Concerns also arise regarding the "5b applicants" - those students who have expressed interest in a sport but have not been actively recruited by a coach. Coaches feel obligated to account for 5b students on their recruiting lists but complain that these students are frequently sub-par athletes who may or may not be interested in competing at a varsity college level. Once these lists of rankings of both 5b students and recruits are in the hands of the admissions committees, the coaches are removed from the process and must wait until April for acceptance announcements.

The admissions process at Pomona prompts a general feeling of discouragement and frustration in the athletic department. Though coaches harbor no malice towards the admissions office, they do not deny that they are fighting a losing recruiting battle. One coach insists, "We are recruiting SAT scores, not athletes." Coaches agree that Pomona has a standard to uphold, and no coach wants to see an athlete admitted without the appropriate academic qualifications. Coaches recognize the priority of academics in the lives of Pomona students and consistently demonstrate their understanding by encouraging athletes to study abroad, take on challenging course loads and miss practice whenever necessary to attend classes and review sessions.

Regardless, no amount of flexibility on the part of the coaching staff eases the annual difficulty of recruiting. "It's definitely disheartening," comments men's tennis coach Ryan Witt. "A coach's recruiting philosophy changes: as a young coach, you're determined to send out hundreds of letters, but with time, you start to play only to the people you think have a legitimate shot at getting in." Witt's position echoes that of many Sagehen coaches; in recruiting, a coach hopes for the numbers to field a team without expecting a depth of talent.

Swimming coach Penny Lee Dean, an alumna and a seasoned veteran in the recruiting process at Pomona, remarks, "Years ago you could read a student's file and know who's going to get in. Nowadays, we're given very little heads-up." Dean, like many of her coaching colleagues, cannot remember the last time her number one recruit was admitted. "I understand the difficulties the admissions office faces, but it's too hard mentally and physically for a coach to get excited about the potential athletes. So much time is committed by every coach to a process that produces such little results."

There is a striking correlation between the increase of Pomona admission standards and the decrease in the number of Pomona-Pitzer conference championships. At the height of Sagehen athletic success in the 1990s, Pomona-Pitzer athletes were winning anywhere from 5 to 7 SCIAC championships a year. Pomona's admission rates, hovering within the range of 35 to 45 percent in the 90s, have since dropped to below 25 percent, and the number of championships has plummeted correspondingly.

Despite the statistics, Dean of Admissions Bruce Poch rejects the assumption that higher academic standards eliminate the possibility of recruiting top athletic talent. "It's a false dichotomy," insists Poch. "Athletes can be smart-our student body at Pomona is proof that smarts and athletic talent are not mutually exclusive."

Poch emphasizes the small size of each class at Pomona and the limited room he has to accommodate the desires of various departments across the campus. Though he admits that standards for admissions have risen, he points out that competition for acceptance into liberal arts colleges has intensified across the board. Poch asserts that in spite of such heightened competition, the raw number of athletes admitted to Pomona has not dropped.
Poch draws attention to the fact that though Pomona's overall admission rate was a severe 21 percent in 2002, 48 percent of all applying student-athletes were accepted. Whether these students are recruits or self-described 5b athletes is unclear. In addition, recruited students may already be a more selective and qualified group of applicants because coaches only encourage those with a legitimate chance of acceptance. Though the 48 percent acceptance rate of athletes is impressive, Poch's statistics fail to portray the larger picture, as indicated by the vast disparity between the numbers of "athletes" admitted and the number of athletes that actually commit to varsity sports.

One explanation for such a disparity is what the admissions office identifies as the matriculation rate. Of 170 recruited applicants last year, 81 were offered spots in the incoming class of 2006. 53 of these individuals are now at Pomona. According to Poch, "Kids are applying to more and more schools, so it's much harder to get students to commit to coming, especially athletes who are being courted by other programs."

Equally significant is the reality that a number of accepted athletes come to Pomona and do not play four years. The appeal of committing three plus hours a day to a sport while meeting the demands of a difficult academic load is often lost on the student-athlete; quitting is not an uncommon phenomena in the Sagehen athletic department.

Poch acknowledges the difficulties coaches face in the process of recruiting. "Coaches aren't unreasonable in their requests. They're supposed to take care of their teams." Nevertheless, he believes it is the coach's job to find kids who can do the work. "Some coaches bang on doors and look under rocks to find the perfect match for Pomona, and some hardly do anything at all," Poch claims.

By including a more diverse range of applicants on their recruiting lists, coaches could help themselves garner higher numbers of freshmen every year. Factors such as geographical location, economic background, and ethnicity should be granted more attention by coaches eager to compile a recruiting list attractive to admissions committees; SAT scores and grades are not the only criteria dictating the outcome of a student file.

Ultimately, the quality of athletes representing Pomona-Pitzer is a measure of Pomona admissions' commitment to the athletic department. High athlete acceptance rates and communication with coaches demonstrates the office's awareness of athletic department needs. Poch openly acknowledges, however, that winning SCIAC championships is not what the admissions officers have in mind when considering recruited applicants. "I'm not going to bend at all for some sports," says Poch firmly. "Our goal is not to win SCIAC every year -we want our students to have a good time and an enjoyable athletic experience." It's debatable whether or not an athlete can have such a positive athletic experience, when, as Coach Witt describes it, "they're getting pounded day in and day out."

Markedly lower admissions standards at rival SCIAC schools automatically put Pomona at an athletic disadvantage. Coaches at schools like Whittier, Occidental, California Lutheran and La Verne have the opportunity to offer enrollment to a broader range of student-athletes.

On the flip side, however, Pomona offers the rewards of an elite liberal arts institution that many other schools lack. "It's challenging to find an individual who embodies both academic and athletic excellence, but once we do find those people, we have a very attractive product to sell them," says athletic director and men's basketball coach Charlie Katsiaficas. He adds, "Every department chair may want more for their department, but I'm confident that the admissions office is doing their best to honor our needs without lowering their standards."

Bruce Poch is admittedly defensive when it comes to discussing admissions for athletes. "Anyone who claims that athletics are not a priority is dead wrong," he insists. To Poch's credit, athletes are often given more attention throughout the process than other applicants, even if they are ultimately turned down. Says one admissions officer, "athletes get a bigger bump than good artists, writers, dancers or musicians."
Concerns regarding President Stanley's retirement and a shift away from athletics under the authority of incoming President Oxtoby are unfounded, Poch believes. The priorities of the admissions office are set by Pomona's Board of Trustees, a group consistently loyal to the athletic endeavors of the institution.

In the face of a weakening athletic department, is the admissions office doing enough to prevent Pomona from going the way of Cal Tech? The answer remains to be seen. The complexities of the admissions process-compounded by elite standards, the demands placed upon Pomona students, and the scarcity of accomplished high school student-athletes-leave no obvious solutions for a struggling athletic department.