I could talk about this for days. UVa swimmers and or tennis players rarely need or care about scholarships. BUT they want to get in.
Mostly football and basketball players could really use/ absolutely need scholarships to go to UVa
The rest is kinda easy to figure out
Câmon, you know exactly what they are. Plus some specific companies.
My wife used to run undergrad and MBA recruiting for Merrill Lynchâs Banking and Research groups for the US. They recruited at about 10-15 MBA programs and maybe 20 undergrad programs, plus people who had connections somehow, and that was it.
Like 1 person/year got an offer who wasnât connected or from one of those schools.
Oh man I have some great stories from those days when I was at big banks on sales and trading side
Literally every candidate had same resume
At Citi we did have a connection still with UVa so that was cool having those kids come through
My wife always said Virginia and Carnegie Mellon kids were here favorites, she hated Duke kids, and Chicago kids were weird.
Want to pose a âbig picture / structuralâ question to the group.
If/when MBB and FB create a GM (or equivalent) position, someone to handle recruiting, NIL, roster building, etc., should it be (a) someone who works for and is hired by the head coach, aka just part of the HCâs staff, or (b) someone who works for the AD and hired outside of the head coachâs purview, like you see with most pro teams?
Neither.
If youâre into change starting from the top, it has to be the BOV taking initiative, and working with a search firm to find the right person for what they want the program to be in terms of funding, NIL policy, etc.
And Iâd take it a step further, the presidents of UVa, VPI, JMU, and ODU should be lobbying the General Assembly to specifically grant such powers to a BOV. Good football is an economic driver for those regions.
I think AD should hire, but this stuff is all early
enough that Iâd like to see different models and see what works. And maybe different things work in different places
I see some direct cultural and socioeconomic lines there. Just sayingâŚ
Absolutely. Fencing⌠now theres a sport with diversity!
Iâll take Wild Assumptions for $200, Alex.
Went to school with a guy named Virgil Heathcock. Heâs Black, his wife is Asian. Both of his sons are fencers, and one of them was on the U.S. fencing team at the Paris Olympic this summer.
Itâs a diverse team that did well in Paris.
I quite literally said there is wild diversity in fencingâŚ
Sure, but I think there was an assumption of sarcasm.
Sailing teams, to the extent they exist, are pretty lacking in diversity. And polo, I think.
Polo actually is very South American heavy in my (very limited) experience.
It should be a separate AD-level position
Funny back in the day worked with a guy who seemed pretty rich. He came to work one day with great idea he thought to get his kids Ivy Scholarships. It was Fencing
I said quietly âyo Ed they dont give atheltic scholarships and you make too much money to get need basedâ
Homeboy deflated and back to the drawing board
I voted AD hires but I think it would really depend on what the role of the GM is⌠if it follows NFL model and (if I understood it correctly) the Stanford model with Luck I wouldnât want the coach hiring the person presiding over them. But if itâs more a NIL/recruiting structure/business model no issues with coach hiring.
That said I donât think it would hurt for coach to have a meeting with the candidate before the hire. Not saying real interview but I donât think it hurts to make sure everyoneâs vision is aligned if theyâre all part of the long term plan.
I chose coach hire.
I feel like it should be a position basketball and football both have and those head coaches should be the complete CEOs of their own sport. I donât like the idea of a much less accountable, more anonymous person hired by the AD and not accountable to the public face of each program. Seems like a bad model.
Hah, yeah, though I think at least for admissions purposes your coworker at least used to be right. I fenced when I was younger, and was pretty good. A good friend who I was roughly on par with fenced for Columbia in the late 80s/early 90s. He wasnât that good (plus, epee. Meh.), but it hellped.
But I mean⌠Ivyâs are all D1 and for fencing, most are high D1. And at the D1 level today, even the most obscure sports have crazy levels of competition. I took it back up when we moved to NYC and even took it pretty seriously for a while. I was still young enough to be pretty good shape, a major fencing center was like 3 blocks from our apartment, and we didnât have kids yet. I probably put 10-15 hours/week into it for a while, going to tournaments and stuff.
And every high school kid who had aspirations of fencing in college just wrecked me. It was partially that I was older and slower, but I think mostly just that a lot more people were taking it a lot more seriously than they had 15 years before.
I think there are reasons to support either model, but I donât see accountability as one of those reasons. If you have a model where the GM and coach are at the same level and both report to the AD, theyâre both accountable to the AD, and if you define roles well enough, then it should be relatively clear to the public whoâs doing what (at least broadly speaking).
I canât help but keep thinking of my dumb fencing jokes â yes, in NYC the competition to move stolen goods is very intense. Even the Ivy League hopefuls get involved apparently.