5 ms·

The vast majority of high schools where I'm from don't have public pools. Pools have also been less available historically to Blacks. After segregation ended,

• kevincrane 6y ago
  Oh yeah, I don't dispute the history of pools in America in general of having a lot of racist gatekeeping behind them, that's absolutely true. I was just saying that swimming and water polo are super cheap sports to participate in as an athlete.
  • watwut 6y ago
    Swimming is cheap only if there is cheap pool available.
  • teachrdan 6y ago
    But to become a competitive student athlete accomplished enough to get into a school like Berkeley, you have to go to a high school with its own pool, coach, and roster of fellow competitive swimmers. When it comes to who gets these coveted "easy" seats for college admissions, it's not enough to say that the sport is hypothetically inexpensive to participate in. You have to look at all the resources that make it possible to become an elite athlete in that sport. Most public schools--especially poor ones--don't have those resources.
    • Balgair 6y ago
      Not always true. One of the girls at one of the schools near us didn't have any of that (most likely). I think they shared their pool with a few teams though. I know they didn't have their own coach, and I know that she was the stand-out star of the team. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Seidemann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Seidemann Their demographics are white, but not majority, with ~30% hispanic. I don't know the demo in 2006 though: https://www.greatschools.org/california/pleasant-hill/466-College-Park-High-School/#Race_ethnicity*College_readiness*Overview https://www.greatschools.org/california/pleasant-hill/466-Co... Natural talent is still a thing. Though I do agree that more $$$ = better training. David Epstein's Range talks a lot about training in your younger years. He has a much better argument than me, but the gist is that you have to have a 'trial' period before you commit (depending on sport conditions). In 'unkind' (his term) sports, if you overtrain early, you'll burn out. I'd say Water Polo and Volleyball are those kids of sports. Swimming, on the other hand, is a 'kind' sport where early identification and rigorsous training are beneficial. It's a really good book: https://davidepstein.com/the-range/ https://davidepstein.com/the-range/
      • maccard 6y ago
        > Not always true. > One of the girls at one of the schools near us didn't have any of that (most likely). I think they shared their pool with a few teams though. I know they didn't have their own coach, and I know that she was the stand-out star of the team. Of course it's not always true. However your rebuttal actually proves the point of this discussion. You can name one outlier, who is exactly that, an outlier. The issue isn't "athletic scholarships are 100% inaccessible to people outside of the top 10% wealth bracket", it's more along the lines of "the overwhelming majority of athletic scholarships for sports are provided to people who are already benefitting from systemic privelege, and the remaining slots will be filled by outliers" Consider two equally skilled waterpolo players, one who has a shared pool and the facilities to go with it, and one who has a private pool, coaching staff, etc. Now consider who is more likely to be in that position in the first place. That's not to say that there are no minorities in the second group, but they are overwhelmingly more likely to not end up in that scenario in the first place.
        • Balgair 6y ago
          I'm not so sure, but I'd need to see the actual data on how Pac-12/Olympic/NCAA/whatever break down in terms of economics.