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Post by hcpride on Jan 1, 2018 9:07:09 GMT -5
If raising the College's profile via athletics is the only goal, there is only one path that I can see. These are the steps: 1. Drop football because FCS football doesn't help raise our profile and we cannot play BCS football with any success at all. 2. Drop as many sports as the PL will allow us to drop 3. Play a national OOC mens basketball schedule while pouring as much money as necessary into the program. (This would include a $1 million dollar or more head coach and well paid assistants.) 4. Win the PL several times. 5. Get in the Big East because, quite frankly, the A10 and the CAA are not worth it from a publicity perspective. 6. Succeed in the Big East (including by lowering admissions standards for basketball players) This should not take more than 10-15 years to accomplish and then, maybe, just maybe we might see some results. Another way to look at this is to remember that raising the college's profile to attract non athletes is the job of the Admissions Office. To the extent that athletics success helps that cause, that's great, but in the meantime, I would like to see more direct mail, more counselors going to more high schools and an increased endowment to allow the elimination of loans from financial aid packages and to guarantee every student $3500 for one summer of unpaid internship or research. Well-reasoned and logically-sequenced points descending from your initial premise. (There are many goals of the athletic program, but the strict premise appropriately frames one.) In addition to buying (or at least accepting for the sake of argument) the premise, one has to recognize a need for boosting our college's profile and attracting increased quality and quantity of applicants for this to make any sense at all. Expansion of merit aid - in the manner of two non-football schools such as Boston University and Northeastern - is another established means of attracting quality non-athlete applicants/enrollees. In addition to "more direct mail, more counselors going to more high schools and an increased endowment to allow the elimination of loans from financial aid packages and to guarantee every student $3500 for one summer of unpaid internship or research."
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Post by trimster on Jan 1, 2018 22:35:41 GMT -5
Since I don't see the College of the Holy Cross moving to a higher profile league any time soon, how about looking at ways to improve the Patriot League with one sport in particular, basketball, being the focus. I would try to expand the membership to 12 or 14 by inviting schools in that are well-respected academically and have pretty decent basketball histories. More on that in a minute. First, I would make it easier, not easy, for hoop recruits to gain admission. I don't know much about the academic bands used to determine admission but I believe you are allowed x number of recruits in low bands and the rest have to be in higher bands. I don't know if that applies to each sport or across the board in toto. Regardless of how it currently works, I would allow the basketball programs to submit recruits who meet the low band requirements to Admissions with the expectation those recruits would be admitted. In other words, do away with the high band requirements for basketball recruits.
As far as expansion goes, I would approach one school that is a real geographic outlier in its league, Northeastern, another school that clearly is out of its league athletically, Fordham, and two schools where there is some interest in aligning themselves with schools of a higher profile academically, Fairfield and Davidson. I realize the latter is a real stretch but I included them for several reasons. I think they may be one of those programs where the coach, Bob McKillop, means so much to the program, (see Ralph Willard at HC), and he has to be nearing retirement. The administration may be looking at what is the best fit for the program after McKillop. The other reason is they have football and maybe there are some people at Davidson who would like to compete in a scholarship football league.
I think basketball would move up to a much more respectable level than its current Sagarin rating of 26 out of 33 conferences.
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Post by hcgrad94 on Jan 2, 2018 6:48:07 GMT -5
Davidson would drop football before they went to scholarships.
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Post by alum on Jan 2, 2018 8:41:14 GMT -5
If raising the College's profile via athletics is the only goal, there is only one path that I can see. These are the steps: 1. Drop football because FCS football doesn't help raise our profile and we cannot play BCS football with any success at all. 2. Drop as many sports as the PL will allow us to drop 3. Play a national OOC mens basketball schedule while pouring as much money as necessary into the program. (This would include a $1 million dollar or more head coach and well paid assistants.) 4. Win the PL several times. 5. Get in the Big East because, quite frankly, the A10 and the CAA are not worth it from a publicity perspective. 6. Succeed in the Big East (including by lowering admissions standards for basketball players) This should not take more than 10-15 years to accomplish and then, maybe, just maybe we might see some results. Another way to look at this is to remember that raising the college's profile to attract non athletes is the job of the Admissions Office. To the extent that athletics success helps that cause, that's great, but in the meantime, I would like to see more direct mail, more counselors going to more high schools and an increased endowment to allow the elimination of loans from financial aid packages and to guarantee every student $3500 for one summer of unpaid internship or research. Well-reasoned and logically-sequenced points descending from your initial premise. (There are many goals of the athletic program, but the strict premise appropriately frames one.) In addition to buying (or at least accepting for the sake of argument) the premise, one has to recognize a need for boosting our college's profile and attracting increased quality and quantity of applicants for this to make any sense at all. Expansion of merit aid - in the manner of two non-football schools such as Boston University and Northeastern - is another established means of attracting quality non-athlete applicants/enrollees. In addition to "more direct mail, more counselors going to more high schools and an increased endowment to allow the elimination of loans from financial aid packages and to guarantee every student $3500 for one summer of unpaid internship or research." I agree that the only justification for a drastic move like the one I suggested is that it would improve the College as a whole. I am not convinced it would work. As to your comment about merit aid, I agree that it can be useful as long as it is not overdone. I looked at the BU program you mentioned. If scaled down to reflect the smaller school size, it might well be a viable option. Another way to do it is to guarantee full tuition to any valedictorians. The advantage to doing that is that kids know they will get it and might just apply early decision and get the admissions process done. Discounting tuition has to be done carefully because it is dangerous to cash flow if poorly managed. Raising $250 million dollars so the College could market that there are no loans in admissions packages would be be a real great move, too. I think that we could compete more effectively for students against some of the NESCAC's, Bucknell, Lafayette, BU, and even some of the less generous Ivy's if we did that. And that would be a hell of a lot better than the drastic proposal I offered.
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Post by hcpride on Jan 2, 2018 11:33:10 GMT -5
Well-reasoned and logically-sequenced points descending from your initial premise. (There are many goals of the athletic program, but the strict premise appropriately frames one.) In addition to buying (or at least accepting for the sake of argument) the premise, one has to recognize a need for boosting our college's profile and attracting increased quality and quantity of applicants for this to make any sense at all. Expansion of merit aid - in the manner of two non-football schools such as Boston University and Northeastern - is another established means of attracting quality non-athlete applicants/enrollees. In addition to "more direct mail, more counselors going to more high schools and an increased endowment to allow the elimination of loans from financial aid packages and to guarantee every student $3500 for one summer of unpaid internship or research." I agree that the only justification for a drastic move like the one I suggested is that it would improve the College as a whole. I am not convinced it would work. As to your comment about merit aid, I agree that it can be useful as long as it is not overdone. I looked at the BU program you mentioned. If scaled down to reflect the smaller school size, it might well be a viable option. Another way to do it is to guarantee full tuition to any valedictorians. The advantage to doing that is that kids know they will get it and might just apply early decision and get the admissions process done. Discounting tuition has to be done carefully because it is dangerous to cash flow if poorly managed. Raising $250 million dollars so the College could market that there are no loans in admissions packages would be be a real great move, too. I think that we could compete more effectively for students against some of the NESCAC's, Bucknell, Lafayette, BU, and even some of the less generous Ivy's if we did that. And that would be a hell of a lot better than the drastic proposal I offered. I am not sure that we have much (if any) of an applicant overlap with NESCAC schools and Ivies or, for that matter (and perhaps surprisingly) with Bucknell or Lafayette but do agree there are some innovations/differentiations we could leverage to raise our college admissions profile.
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Post by bigfan on Jan 2, 2018 18:53:00 GMT -5
No schools with a decent basketball program are going to join the Patriot League.
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Post by timholycross on Jan 3, 2018 8:29:15 GMT -5
Davidson would drop football before they went to scholarships. I still haven't figured out what NU thinks the CAA does for them, although overall it is a better basketball league. And at one time one could just apply there and get in, pretty much, not so any more; the Boston college popularity factor has made that place a pretty tough admission (28%). The others, meh. In a perfect world I'd trade places with Fordham in a second. Of course, that would mean that Holy Cross would get more serious about winning than it's shown.
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