Contact Info:

Alex Krupp
133 Lantern Ridge Road
New Canaan, CT 06840

home: 203-972-3917
cell: 607-351-2671

alex.krupp@gmail.com

Creative Commons License

Valid XHTML 1.0!

Valid CSS!

Get Firefox!

Would an Infinitely Rational Pirate Play Soccer?

# A Geek's Guide to Gaming the College Admissions Process

Published 2/23/05

Seventh grade was the year I didn't sleep. For months I don't think I ever saw natural sunlight as I wasted away playing Ultima Online in my parents' basement. To this day I still squint whenever I go outside.

My parents would make me go to bed, and then once they were asleep I'd sneak back downstairs to play a few more hours. I figured that if I slept during my classes then I'd have more time to level up at night. Well after a few months of this my parents caught on and handed down their ultimatum: if I wanted to continue playing UO then I would have to take up a sport.


Rowing. I just chose it at random from a list of sports without knowing what it was. In hindsight I guess I got lucky, which I will explain later. So a year and a half later I sold my UO account for 600 bucks, but I stuck with rowing anyway. Then came high school. The first semester of my freshman year I worked my ass off in school. I didn't sleep at night because I wanted the best grades I could possibly get. After school at practice I was just going through the motions without really excelling. Second semester I had an epiphany.

An honest graft
I don't know if I figured it out all at once or if it was a gradual realization over time. I knew I liked rowing. I knew I wanted to go to college. I knew I hated high school. I knew that the Ivy League schools were really the only ones you could go to and have a shot at winning the national championship as lightweight. But it's damn hard to get into an Ivy League school. Even valedictorians and kids with perfect SATs are rejected from their top picks every year. But athletes got into the best schools even with mediocre grades...

Let's think about this logically. To get into an Ivy as just a student you basically need straight A's, 1400 SATs, and lots of extracurriculars. This meant I'd have to go to school eight hours a day, do two or three hours of extracurriculars, and then go home to six or so hours of homework. As an athlete A's and B's are fine as long as you don't have any C's, and you don't need any major extracurriculars other than your sport. That's what the coaches will tell you when you're being recruited at least, but in reality a couple C's are usually fine if you just want to go to an Ivy but you don't much care which. This would require going through the motions of being a student, and then practicing a couple hours a day year-round. Same result, less work, more fun! The only problem with this plan was that you needed to be good at sports.

An unlearning process
I spent years reading books on rowing and physiology, and I've spent countless hours reading training advice on Usenet and the web. For example, I now know that a darker colored boat absorbs more sunlight and transfers this heat to the water. The warmer water decreases friction, giving a speed advantage. The trade off is that the darker the paint the heavier the pigment, increasing the weight of the boat. There is a general consensus that yellow is the fastest color, though no one agrees on which shade.

If you are a geek you will naturally care about stuff like this. The hardest thing to understand as you transition from geek to athlete is that none of it really matters. Being an edge junky might put you over the top, but you can't buy your way into a sport no matter how much money you spend. Right now you may be saying to yourself, "But pHatidic, shouldn't I be training smarter, not harder?" Shut the fuck up and go for a run.

Be all you can be
There are really only two things you need to be the best at your sport. First, you need to have the genetic potential to succeed. Everyone has the potential to be good at a sport, and no one has the potential to be good in every sport. Secondly, you need to work harder than everyone else. What follows is a reasoned attempt in helping you choose a sport in which you will have both the potential and desire to succeed.

Watson, there's a crick in my DNA
As I said before, everyone can succeed in a sport but not everyone can succeed in every sport. There are three types of muscle fibers: type I, type IIa, and type IIb. Type I is slow twitch muscle fiber, the staple of endurance sports like rowing, cross country skiing, and cycling. Type II fibers are the fast twitch muscles necessary for football and Quake 3 Arena. Type IIa muscles can essentially become type I muscles through training, whereas type IIb muscles are permanently fast twitch. What this means is that the aerobic system is more trainable than the anaerobic system. That is, if you aren't currently good at running long distances then there may be hope, but if you aren't a very fast sprinter then you probably never will be. For each sport there is an ideal percentage of each muscle type. To maximize your chances of athletic success, choose a sport that your body is well suited for.

Until recently, the only way to determine your muscle types has been to have a biopsy. From what I've heard, this involves an expensive trip to your local sports physiology lab and a lot of pain. In fact, the procedure is usually recommended only for dead people. In the most recent issue of Rowing News, there was an article about a new company, genetic technologies which is offer genetic testing to determine your muscle types. All you have to do is swab your cheek and mail in the sample, and it is only $100. I haven't done any research into this yet, so caveat emptor.

Once you know what your muscle fiber ratios are, you can consult a list of sports and what muscle types they require. The book Lactate Threshold Training by Peter Janssen has a table with this info in it, and if you are going to take up an endurance sport then you should buy it anyway. Of course, you can always ask about a specific sport in the appropriate Usenet group.

Pick your battles
According to the NCAA, there is one slot in the NFL for every 6,000 high school football players and one slot in the NBA for every 10,000 basketball players. This leaves only one realistic option for most of us schmucks: choose the sport with the least competition. Here are the high school and college athletic participation rates.

There are less than one hundred male high school field hockey players, and there are eleven spots on the Olympic men's field hockey team. The problem though is that colleges don't recruit male field hockey players. Do your due diligence on which sports are the easiest to get recruited for. For example, if you are a lacrosse player then you have to go to camps where scouts rate you. There are hundreds of kids for every available slot. If you are a rower then you just call up the coach and say you want to row. At many schools there are more slots than there are rowers, so the coaches end up recruiting some kids who have never even rowed before but who are interested; many ran track and blew out their knees or swam but aggravated their shoulders or became allergic to chlorine. Most sports are somewhere in between, so know what you are getting into.

Alternatively, I know of one school where the former rowing coach is on the board of admissions.

The Olympian stands alone
In order to be better than everyone else, you have to work harder than everyone else. Unfortunately, there is no way around this. After all, if everyone did exactly the same thing then it would just be flip-a-coin to determine the winner. Working harder than everyone else means that most of your training will be done alone, so pick a sport that will be enjoyable when there is no one else to train with or cheer you on. Personally, I can sit on the rowing machine all day by myself, but for some reason I have trouble forcing myself to lift weights. Know thyself.

Smoke a fatty for Rebagliati
If you want to take up a sport competitively, don't bother unless it's an Olympic sport. This is because only Olympic sports have strict drug and steroid testing. It would suck to invest a large portion of your life in something and then have someone else beat you because they took steroids or EPO. When you participate in an Olympic sport then you are subject to random drug testing at any time from both your sports' National Organizing Committee and WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency. Not only this, but if you actually make the Olympics then they usually store your test samples for life. This means that if someone takes a drug that isn't currently known about then they can be caught in the future when science and technology improves. It is important not to confuse this with mandatory drug testing for high school athletes, which is largely considered an invasion of privacy because it tests for illicit rather than performance enhancing drugs.

Peaches and Penumbras
Bananas contain three natural sugars--sucrose, fructose and glucose combined with fiber, bananas give an instant, sustained and substantial boost of energy. Research has proven that just two bananas provide enough energy for a strenuous 90-minute workout.

There are three different energy systems: The phosphate system, the anaerobic system, and the aerobic system. The foods you are required to eat during training and before races largely depend on what systems your body will be drawing its energy from. Don't take up weight lifting if you are a vegetarian unless you really like tofu and protein shakes. Don't take up running if you require a large breakfast before your morning workout. Don't take up lightweight rowing ever. Also, no matter which sport you take up, you will be eating a lot of bananas.

Trapped under ice, comfortably cold
This may seem obvious, but to some people it isn't. You can't be the best in the sport if you are afraid of competing. Don't take up baseball if you are afraid of being beaned. Don't take up cycling if you are afraid of falling or crashing. Don't take up an endurance sport if you don't have the cajones to handle the pain. Don't take up rowing if you are afraid of water or can't swim. I coached rowing for a couple summers, and you'd be surprised how many people we had to turn away because they fell into one of these categories.

How will this get me laid?
Sports have a profound impact on one's social life. Choose a sport with an agreeable social atmosphere. Different sports have different cultures. In some, the team grade point average is usually higher than the school average, and in other sports the majority of the kids don't graduate. All sports have good parties, but is there an analogous team of the opposite sex who will be coming to them? Are they hot and do they frequently wear spandex? Will I have to see her again tomorrow at morning practice?

Many schools have an "old boys network" that will hook you up with a high paying job after you graduate. Sometimes these programs are for all athletes in the school, and other times they are sport specific. Ask your potential coaches if they can hook you up with a job after you graduate with your 1.6 GPA; it'll make a good first impression.

And is there honey still for tea?
I was always picked last in gym class, and floundered around miserably in soccer, t-ball, baseball, swimming, etc. I played tennis for a while but ultimately I quit after fifth grade because I didn't like running. I always thought I was just bound to be a computer nerd forever, but then I discovered rowing, the only sport you can win sitting on your ass going backwards, and a whole world of sports that for whatever reason aren't offered in schools. You see, even though I am not 'athletic', I am actually a fairly good athlete. Either you understand this or you don't.

Ultimately it worked out and I got into an Ivy with significantly less effort than would normally be required. There is risk involved, but no more than trying to go the academic route. Of course, you can still be a good athlete and get good grades at the same time. But then again, if you do superfluous work then you're probably not really a geek; laziness is the mother of invention.


Read the comments on this piece at Kuro5hin.