(04-28-2021 10:02 AM)mrbig Wrote:  Ham - great post. The point I like that you touch on is this. nightowl24 and others aren't really complaining because their kids are missing out or because their family is missing out. The problem is that RICE is missing out! There is an opportunity to identify and recruit student-athletes that are more likely to choose Rice than another random student-athlete without the familial connection. These kids will be fine at another school. But Rice is sometimes going to be less successful because of this. They are frustrated because they love Rice and want to see Rice succeed and see ways that Rice can have more success.

And the "its just business" approach can be detrimental to Rice as well. If Rice isn't putting in some work with the children of alumni, they might be turning off the alumni and those alumni will be less involved in Rice moving forward. I saw this with a family of non-athlete alumni in New Orleans. Both parents Rice grads, both kids valedictorians in high school, neither kid got into Rice, both kids went to Northwestern, the parents give more to Northwestern than Rice now.

To be fair, I think there are two conversations going on - a discussion about how things are actually happening in the real world and the hurdles to Rice focusing on Rice kids, and a discussion about how Rice could adjust its strategy to target Rice kids, bu without respect to any hurdles/resource limitations.

They’re related, for sure, but it’s hard to have a discussion about either, when the response to the former uses the latter, and vice versa.

I doubt anyone disagrees with the idea that Rice could benefit from targeting student athletes with Rice connections/ties. But there’s a difference in only looking at the surface of how Rice could leverage those connections, and discussing why Rice might not be leveraging those connections.

For example, nightowl mentioned how Rice does a good job of keeping track of their alumni and where they live. Does Rice do the same with children of alumni? If they don’t, is there some reason they do not track it that we’re collectively unaware of? And does the athletic department currently have this information shared with them, or do their own tracking?