To play or not to play: a recruit's choice

What happens when recruited athletes decide there's more to life at Yale than varsity sports?

By Matt Matros

Teddy Miller, SM '99, was going to be a Yale basketball star. As a freshman, he got on the floor against Ray Allen and the Connecticut Huskies at the Hartford Civic Center. As a sophomore, he played the third most minutes on the team. But two weeks before the start of the '97-'98 season, Miller decided to quit.

"A lot of people wondered...of all people, why would I leave?" Miller said. "I was going to be the man on the basketball court."

Miller is a high-profile example of a recruited athlete at Yale who eventually decided not to play. Recruits are one of three "special interest categories" of applicants to Yale (legacies and minorities are the others). "If they survive initial comparison with everyone else in the Yale applicant pool and look like reasonable candidates, then there is additional weight given to their application," Director of Undergraduate Admissions Margit Dahl said.

Since athletes get this advantage in the admissions process, they are expected to contribute to their teams once they arrive. The decision to stop playing can be a tough one for athletes to make and coaches to stomach.

Fortunately for Miller, men's basketball head coach Dick Kuchen has no hard feelings. "Teddy's a great guy...an exceptional student, an exceptional kid. I'm proud of Teddy," Kuchen said.

Miller is not the only high-profile athlete to leave his team. Corey Lee, TD '00, a recruited running back, could have been a major contributor to last year's football squad, which suffered many injuries to its backfield.

For Lee, who stopped playing football a month into his freshman year, the time commitment was just too much. "The coaches were very nice about it," Lee said. "They told me they understood my decision, and if I wanted to come back I was more than welcome."

Yale cannot offer athletic scholarships, and University officials know the athletes are not bound to play for any particular team once they arrive. Head football coach Jack Siedlecki, who was coaching at Amherst when Lee arrived, said he expects some of his recruits to find interests outside of football. "Places like Yale have a lot of things to offer," Siedlecki said. "We're asking a big commitment out of the kids here."

Indeed, most athletes interviewed said they stopped playing their sports because they couldn't find time to explore the wealth of other activities at Yale. As Miller put it, "You're interested in what to do at Yale, or you're interested in what to do at Payne Whitney Gym." He added that playing varsity basketball required a full commitment, and anything less would have been unfair to his teammates. As his junior year approached, Miller knew he would be called on to lead the team.

"It was...all the more incumbent upon me to either do what I was supposed to do, or not do it at all," he said. "I felt even more of an obligation not to play."

Coaches, then, must strike a delicate balance between the need for commitment from their players and the need to retain their players. When an athlete does decide to stop competing, it obviously hurts the team.

"Of course it's disappointing," men's heavyweight crew coach David Vogel said. He stressed, however, that it is useless for coaches to force their athletes into making commitments they can't keep. "You're not going to be successful holding a gun to people's heads saying, `You have to be on the team.'"

The pressure not to disappoint coaches and teammates is there, and as if that were not enough, recruits also know they were chosen to be Yale's next generation of athletes through an extensive and often expensive process.

Siedlecki, who spends 75 to 80 percent of his time in the offseason recruiting players, has more restrictions to consider than any other Yale coach. His players must mirror the rest of the university in terms of academic index (AI), a measure of high school rank-in-class and standardized scores. In hockey and basketball, the requirements are more lenient because a minimum AI must be achieved by the average scores of the players accepted to Yale, not the actual matriculating team members.

Siedlecki initially sends out 9,100 letters to prospective players whom he has reason to believe are capable of being admitted to Yale. "More than half of the kids get eliminated academically," he said. Without the AI, Siedlecki said, he could convince Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Richard Shaw to accept any player Siedlecki deemed worthy.

To be capable as both a student at an Ivy League university and an athlete at the Division I level is rare indeed. No wonder many find it difficult to give varsity sports up without feeling guilty.

"There was pressure for me to continue to do it," Jon Malpass, BK '00, said. Malpass said that after swimming competitively for 15 years, he wanted to have a "normal life."

"I haven't been able to do other things or have other experiences," Malpass said.

Although coaches sometimes tell departing athletes they're welcome to return to the team, decisions to stop competing are usually permanent. "It's almost harder once they're out...to try to come back," Vogel said. "They may feel somewhat shut out from the team."

Coaches take solace knowing there are no guarantees about any given recruit. "The NFL spends millions of dollars a year evaluating talent and number one draft picks have been a total bust," Siedlecki said.

And not every Yale team has consistently lost recruits over the years. Miller is the only recruit that Kuchen could recall leaving his team recently. Men's ice hockey coach Tim Taylor had to think back to the early 1980s to remember the name of a recruit who left his squad. He said that when the topic was raised once at a coaches' conference, he was stunned.

"I was amazed that it was an issue," Taylor said. "I've never had a kid that I've been counting on in recent years that has come in my office and said, `Coach, I don't want to play hockey.'"

Some athletes who stop competing do, apparently, make the wrong decision. "I've seen a lot of my friends who don't really do anything anymore," swimmer Lisa Sweet, MC '00, said of someformer athletes. "They kind of sit around, and their grades have dropped." But these are exceptions. The thrill of victory on can be fulfilling, but most athletes who stop playing do not regret it. Lee has had a "very successful career" on the club rugby team. Malpass, who just stopped swimming, is considering getting a job or playing water polo.

Miller, a former basketball standout, volunteers for the Juvenile Justice League, helping disadvantaged children "caught up in the juvenile justice system." He has an internship at the Yale Child Study Center, working with disadvantaged youth. He is a Literature and African-American Studies double major and a recipient of the Mellon/Bouchet Fellowship. The Mellon/Bouchet program is designed to give people of color opportunities to receive Ph.D.s and eventually teach at the university level.

"I want to do the best at everything I do," Miller said. If that means forgoing basketball, so be it.

Graphic by Sara Edward-Corbett.

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