RonJohn
Helluva Engineer
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Why do we think academics at GT are too rigorous for football and basketball players but not for golfers? Or swimmers? Or volleyball players? Or cross country runners? Or baseball players? We are doing pretty well in those sports.
If you look at the people who are recruited in golf and in Olympic sports, they usually have much better academic records. Many of those sports, at least men's, are equivalency sports so the scholarships aren't necessarily full scholarships. They can be split among several players with partial scholarships. If you recruit players from Georgia, you can pay more players if they qualify for Hope. It probably wouldn't affect decisions about offering to excellent players vs good players. However, if you can get three players with great academics who you value athletically only slightly below one other player with bad academics having more players might make sense.
Without any inside knowledge, it always seems that the golf team has guys with very good academic backgrounds. I don't know much about swimming, volleyball, cross country, track, etc. I have paid some attention to gymnastics, even though GT doesn't have the sport, because of family involvement in the sport. A large portion of the girls who compete in national championship meets for the upper levels of USAG also happen to have GPAs above 4 and at least moderately high test scores. Once again, it wouldn't mean that a team wouldn't take a chance on someone who was able to win every single event by large margins. It does mean that there is a large enough pool of exceptional talent that also has very good academics. You can fill a gymnastics team solely with girls who would have been admitted to the school even without athletic intervention.