Carleton’s varsity teams have racked up an array of honors on the field and in the classroom. Coaches say the secret to their success lies in recruiting students who will thrive at the college, where academics and athletics are ideally balanced.
Christian Zaytoun ’19 began thinking about college while he was a high school sophomore. He knew he wanted a school that offered rigorous academics and a football program that would make the most of his skills as quarterback. He was open to a big school or a small one, Division II or Division III, anywhere in the country.
He knew he was in for a lengthy search, so Zaytoun started collecting coaches’ business cards at a football camp the summer before his junior year. One of those cards belonged to a Carleton coach. Zaytoun did some cursory Googling, but his initial search led him to Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He was willing to leave his home in Raleigh, North Carolina, but Canada was a little too far away. He tossed it aside and moved on to the next one.
Weeks later, when the coach sent him a follow-up email, Zaytoun realized his mistake—that this Carleton was a top-10 liberal arts college in Minnesota—and decided to take a closer look.
A Crowded Field
Students who are both academically and athletically gifted have a variety of options. Division I schools—encompassing the Ivy League and major research universities—offer a full-ride scholarship for top athletes. Division II allows students to attend good schools, often close to home, where they can get a good education, some scholarship money, and potentially more playing time than they would on a Division I team. Division III schools—like Carleton—do not offer athletic scholarships, but instead woo students with a compelling synergy between academics and athletics.
Carleton’s coaches are tasked with recruiting students like Zaytoun who value that synergy above the scholarships, sports culture, and top-flight facilities offered by Division I and II schools. While some recruiters can focus on finding the best athletes, Carleton coaches must first identify the best students.
For that reason, traditional recruiting practices—scouting high school tournaments and sports camps—usually don’t work for Carleton coaches. “It doesn’t make sense to watch a random game and hope that somebody on the team is a high-achieving student,” says softball coach Amy Erickson. Fortunately, many sports camps are now aimed specifically at high academic performers, like the one where Zaytoun first met a Carleton football coach. “Walking in, you know probably 80 to 90 percent of the students are likely academically qualified to attend Carleton,” Erickson says.
Women’s basketball coach Cassie Kosiba boosts her chances of finding qualified students by writing to local Amateur Athletic Union coaches, whose teams draw competitive players from nearby high schools. She asks them to identify the players on their teams who meet Carleton’s benchmark test scores and GPA standards so she knows which ones to watch.
Some coaches take advantage of recruiting services like Prep Hoops, cofounded in 2012 by Jake Phillips ’08, that offer extensive coverage, analysis, and rankings of basketball and volleyball athletes who would be attractive to Division II and III schools. Recruiting services are especially helpful in identifying recruits in locations a coach might not typically visit.
Above all, says Kosiba, the secret to her success remains the personal relationships she’s formed with coaches, administrators, and alumni who watch out for students who might be a good fit for Carleton. “I love nothing more than hearing from an alumnus about a student-athlete I should look at,” she says. “Having eyes and ears across the country really helps us.”
Sealing the Deal
The email that captured Christian Zaytoun’s attention held a promise that academically talented students like him thrive at Carleton, and that he would feel at home on the small campus. Plus, the coaches had watched his game films and believed his skills were a great fit for Knights football. It worked. Zaytoun was convinced that he should learn more about Carleton. And he liked what he saw. But he wanted to know what made Carleton stand out from other top-tier schools.
Carleton coaches have plenty of selling points to offer prospective student-athletes, but they rely most heavily on the college’s dedication to a rigorous academic environment coupled with its collaborative culture.
“Students come here, first and foremost, for a Carleton education,” says men’s soccer coach Bob Carlson. “I’ve had recruits who were also looking at academically prestigious Division I schools, and they were told they would need to be at practice instead of spending all afternoon doing research in a lab. But being an athlete at Carleton doesn’t shut off any other avenue to you.”
“My high school friends ended up going to a lot of different kinds of colleges,” says Zaytoun. “A lot of them were forced to choose between football and academics. I didn’t want that to happen to me.”
Zaytoun felt strongly that his education should come first, but he didn’t want tension with his coaches or teammates because of his choice. He needn’t have worried.
“This is the ninth consecutive year in which the seniors on my team have not missed one minute of class or lab in all four years due to basketball,” says men’s basketball coach Guy Kalland with obvious pride.
In fact, when Kalland meets with prospective students and their families, he talks at length about academics before ever mentioning basketball. When talk does turn to basketball, he focuses on the team’s supportive ethos more than its win-loss record.
Because of Carleton’s selectivity and size, its teams are comparatively small, and that’s part of what makes them so tight, Kalland says. He remembers when a top-level recruit chose Carleton over schools with bigger teams because he saw a stark contrast between Kalland’s close-knit players and the internal jockeying he’d seen elsewhere.
“The collegiality and positivity of this place are special,” says Kalland. “It’s not cutthroat at all.”
That’s one reason coaches work so hard to persuade prospects to visit campus. Once they’ve seen and experienced Carleton’s trademark collegiality firsthand, they have a hard time dismissing it.
When Zaytoun visited Carleton, he struck up an immediate friendship with the football players who hosted him. He was eager to watch them play on Saturday afternoon, but the Friday night he spent with them beforehand turned out to be even more memorable. Their idea of prepping for a big game was to play euchre in a dorm room and watch football on TV. The easy camaraderie made Zaytoun feel like he already belonged at their school and on their team. “Whatever happens with the Xs and Os, the football side of things, felt irrelevant compared to the bond I sensed I would have with the people on the team,” Zaytoun says.
When Zaytoun enrolled at Carleton—after being accepted to more than 10 schools—that friendly Friday night was foremost in his mind.
A Winning Philosophy
Carleton boasts an impressive collection of conference titles, All-American honors, and team and individual success at national championships. Even so, coaches are more concerned with students’ growth and experiences than they are with wins and losses.
“Our student-athletes want to succeed both academically and athletically,” says associate athletic director Heidi Jaynes. “But success doesn’t necessarily mean being the best at everything or always winning. It can mean having a great four years with your teammates.”
For assistant track coach Bill Huyck ’53, success means “doing a little bit better than you did last week or last month.” He coaches the javelin throwers on Carleton’s track and field team.
Although Zaytoun had run track and played baseball in high school, he was looking for a new challenge during football’s off season. He thought it made sense to learn how to throw a javelin when he wasn’t throwing a football.
“Christian is a great athlete,” Huyck says. “I appreciate that the football coaches weren’t proprietary with him. They were willing to give him a couple of afternoons a week off [from regular off-season conditioning] to throw with us.”
“You can do whatever you want at Carleton,” says Zaytoun. “As long as you do it 100 percent, the professors and coaches will support you.”
Zaytoun has thrived not just in javelin, where he’s learned to compete against vastly more experienced throwers, but also on the football team, where he fearlessly took on perennial powerhouse teams like St. John’s and St. Thomas. Even as the Knights faced some tough football losses in recent years, Zaytoun would tie a Carleton record for most touchdown passes (six) in a 2018 game against Hamline.
“Our students choose Carleton, where academics are so important, because it’s the right educational fit for them,” says softball coach Amy Erickson. “Some students don’t even think about playing sports at the college level. But then they get here and realize, ‘Hey, maybe I can continue to play without it affecting my grades.’ So we get walk-ons fairly often.”
Lessons for Life
When Zaytoun mentioned to his football teammates that he wasn’t really considering studying off campus, some older players set him straight. “They told me I would regret it if I didn’t go abroad,” he says. “And they were absolutely right.”
Carleton espouses the benefits of studying off campus in its recruitment materials, and the coaches support that point of view. The college’s trimester system makes it possible for athletes to travel without missing any playing time. Zaytoun participated in coach Bob Carlson’s winter term “Sports and Globalization” program in London and Seville.
Roughly 70 percent of Carleton’s varsity athletes study off campus at least once—the same rate as the overall student body. They also enjoy the rest of the academic benefits Carleton has to offer and go on to win prestigious awards, including highly competitive NCAA postgraduate scholarships, given to just over 100 of the most academically accomplished student-athletes in the United States each year.
“The student-athletes we admit tend to have a drive that serves them well,” says Rhemi Abrams-Fuller ’08, an associate dean of admissions who works closely with coaches on recruiting.
According to athletic director Gerald Young, Carleton’s coaches prize the delicate balance between academics and athletics—plus the camaraderie that comes with knowing everyone is treated equitably—too much to risk upsetting it. “In terms of our admissions process, athletes are treated no differently from any other student,” says Young, “and we believe in that philosophy.”
Instead, Carleton’s admissions officers rate athletic skills in much the same way they consider artistic talent, civic mindedness, or participation in other extracurricular activities. “We’re looking for something beyond test scores,” says Abrams-Fuller, “and we’ve found that our student-athletes bring the same grit and determination they show in their sport to the classroom.”
Statistics professor Adam Loy agrees. After having Zaytoun in several classes and advising him on his senior comps project, Loy has seen Zaytoun’s determination and hard work, even in the face of setbacks. “It’s easy to get discouraged when you don’t see the solution to a problem right away, but Christian doesn’t give up,” says Loy. “He enjoys the process of searching for a solution, even if he doesn’t make it all the way to the answer. That’s a valuable realization, both in life and in statistics: you’re not going to solve every problem.”
Even Zaytoun’s comps project takes advantage of his passion for athletics: his group is developing a new ranking system for college football. They believe a data-based approach based on factors from teams’ performances would be more accurate than the current ranking system, which is influenced heavily by polls of coaches and media experts.
Zaytoun has found that his professors are just as willing to help him achieve his potential as his coaches are. “They want to help students on an individual level, and I can see how much they love watching us grow,” he says. “In Adam’s class, I wasn’t working just for myself. It was like, ‘I have to study hard for this test, because I want him to know that I care about his class and his investment in me.’ ”
Zaytoun’s scholarly growth hasn’t been limited to his major. He decided to take “Introduction to Christianity” to learn about his Catholic faith from a different angle. He enjoyed the class—and professor Kristin Bloomer—so much that he signed up for some of her other classes as well.
“Christian would charge the class with his optimism, curiosity, and appreciation for physical and mental discipline,” Bloomer says. “Even more important was his capacity for imagination. He was able to use his own experiences—including in athletics—to imagine other, bigger worlds. Christian is the type of student who will make good use of the empathy and connection with a broader world that the adventurous yet critical study of religion inspires.”
If Zaytoun regrets anything about his time at Carleton, it’s that he doesn’t have more time to learn from the professors and coaches he credits with his intellectual growth. But graduating this spring will provide new challenges, and Zaytoun is eager to take them on. He’s not sure yet where he’ll be next year, but he faces his unknown future in the same way he’s faced countless opponents on the field: with determination, faith in himself, and eagerness to get to work.
When she was young, volleyball player Faith Skinner ’20 (La Crosse, Wis.) daydreamed about being part of the sports culture at a big university. But she chose Carleton for its academics and has no regrets.
“I usually get my best grades during volleyball season. It’s when I’m most productive.”
After being recruited by Coach Dave Ricks for track, Marco da Cunha ’22 (San Francisco) also joined the soccer team, where he was named an All-American after a standout freshman season.
“People said if I didn’t choose one sport, I could be good at both, but not great. I proved them wrong.”
She may face the green alone, but golfer Alyssa Akiyama ’20 (Terrace Park, Ohio) loves the camaraderie she feels at Carleton.
“I’ll miss class for a week this spring for the national championships, but I know my friends will help me catch up.”