Or wait…
Closing evening I climbed into mattress after a protracted day of surf journalism and started surfing the inside track. Tales about Covid-19 spikes, economists caution of coming near near marketplace cave in after which a headline from The Atlantic that learn, “The Mad, Mad Global of Area of interest Sports activities Amongst Ivy League-Obsessed Folks.”
“Time for extra surf journalism,” I believed to myself, relatively exhausted however, as a real skilled, set out to studying.
The piece starts with a profile of Sloane, a “buoyant, chatty, stay-at-home mother from Fairfield County, Connecticut” who’s shepherding her 3 daughters thru college with goals, like several stay-at-home mother’s named Sloane, of getting them positioned in Ivy League schools/universities.
Harvard, Yale, and so forth.
Fairfield County is named the “Gold Coast” because it sends extra kids to the Ivy League than every other position.
The daughters want grades, complex placement categories, social provider actions and, in fact because the identify suggests, area of interest sports activities.
I questioned which east coast surf membership the women belonged to as I skimmed somewhat forward. Puzzled in the event that they had been hitting one-star QSes or focusing only at the professional junior occasions.
Then I used to be stopped lifeless in my tracks. One daughter fenced. The opposite performed squash. I learn once more. Fencing and squash then raced forward understanding the entire piece used to be about fencing, squash, lacrosse, rowing, water polo and so forth. with browsing nowhere to be observed. Nowhere to be even sniffed.
I persevered studying, in any case, and learned that too many wealthy folks put too many children with too many coaches and so forth. into those area of interest sports activities and now it’s all a large crisis.
According to The Atlantic:
The stampede of the prosperous into grim-faced, extremely aggressive sports activities has been a tragicomedy of perverse incentives and social evolution in unequal instances: a Darwinian parable of the mayhem that may ensue following the invention of even a minor benefit. Like a peacock rendered just about flightless through gaudy tail feathers, the overserved athlete is the made of a procedure that has turn out to be maladaptive, and is now harming the very blue-chip demographic it used to be meant to assist.
However wait.
Is there a chance to bilk wealthy folks with goals of Ivy League placement due the completely recherché process known as browsing?
An historical Peruvian passion with roots stretching to Polynesia?
Turning Connecticut’s Gold Coast into Queensland’s and getting rich within the procedure?
A lot to contemplate.