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The Differences Between NCAA Divisions I, II and III BY RICKY BECKER
By Ricky Becker Division I, II or III? What is the difference? What is the lifestyle? What is right for me? One thing people are surprised about is that the top teams in a lower division would beat a LOT of the lower teams in a higher division. I asked three people I work with, who are currently playing or just graduated, their thoughts on their Division and to provide some insight into the experience for juniors considering college tennis. Amanda Foo Division I Stony Brook University Full-Time Starter Growing up as a kid, playing Division I tennis has always been my goal. I’ve always dreamed of having the privilege of playing tennis at the highest collegiate level possible and competing against the premier teams. Stony Brook University made that happen. The competition was similar to playing a Super Six every weekend…intense and competitive. I got to play against top tier schools and world 20
renowned colleges such as Harvard & Yale, and I enjoyed feeling like I was playing the best that college tennis had to offer. We travelled across the country for some of our matches and would leave campus early in the week, while classes were still in session. The purpose of this was to have time to practice at our away court to prepare us for our matches throughout the weekend. With these long road trips, a lot of time and energy was spent communicating and meeting with my professors ahead of time to plan logistics since I had to miss a lot of lectures and exams. The result of this was that I often had to take exams at an earlier date than my classmates, and there wasn’t as much time to study. Since athletics is such a high priority and players are given scholarships, it takes a lot of effort to be able to balance both as well as you can. There are advantages to being a Division I Varsity athlete though. While they vary from school to school, one of the benefits of being an athlete at Stony Brook was getting priority class registration over the general student body (an extremely valuable perk). My college put a huge premium on fitness and weight training which arguably can wear college athletes down. We had to wake up as early as 5:00 a.m. and train three-to-five hours a day. From there I would go to physical
New York Tennis Magazine • July/August 2020 • NYTennisMag.com
therapy and then straight to class for the rest of the day which, for me, put myself at a disadvantage academically compared to the general student population. There were times that I would rather have athletics take a back seat to academics. Although I sometimes felt that I was overtraining, I really enjoyed traveling and playing matches. I am so happy I had the privilege to see what D1 tennis was all about. Bruno Faletto Division II St. Leo’s University All-American and National Freshman of the Year Division II is often overlooked as a college tennis option. I feel that the generalized view is that every Division I team is better than every Division II team and that is why those schools are Division II. However, the true factors that determine what division a school competes in are infrastructure, sponsors and the size of the school. Of course, this doesn’t always correlate to athletic ability. Especially in sports like tennis where there is not as much money invested in and revenue generated for the
