“It just has to do with the fact that you are putting so much time into [your team], and a lot of [teammates] aren’t branching out,” Morgan-Scott said. “Those who are more introverted—for whom it’s harder to go out, or [who] have gotten so close to people on the team and forgot to branch out at the very beginning—realize that once [they] start leaving [the social circle], they don’t have anyone else.”

Still, some teams are not as constant of a source of social commitment. As a freshman fall walk-on to the women’s heavyweight crew team, Mary M. Carmack ’16 noticed that her social experience did not drastically change after she walked on. Crew team members have diverse interests outside rowing, according to Carmack, “and so for better or for worse, it means that it’s not necessarily your whole social life.”

The fact that walk-on athletes start out at Harvard without the same level of athletic commitment also helps them maintain a social life outside of their team, more so than recruits, said Wachs, who said he has friends outside the baseball team.

“I think that walking on helped me have more connections outside of sports,” Wachs said. “I kind of like that, because in high school I’ve always loved baseball, but I’ve never been like, ‘I’m just a baseball person.’”

Student-Athletes

Joining a varsity sports team also creates academic hurdles to which walk-ons, unlike their recruited peers, did not commit prior to coming to Harvard. While administrators have discussed changes that might make schedules more flexible, classes that meet in certain time windows—particularly in the afternoon—conflict with team practice schedules and thus pose challenges for students devoted to a varsity sport.

Dingman, for his part, expressed concern about this potential academic pitfall for athletes, noting that freshman seminars in the afternoons, in particularly, can be “hard” for freshman athletes to take.

Beyond purely structural limitations, Dingman poses another worry: He has observed that some freshman athletes—including walk-ons—choose their courses based on suggestions from their teammates rather than due to genuine interest in the subject.

“Sometimes the upperclassmen, thinking they’ll be helpful, suggest courses where they had the experience of being able to cut corners and felt that the load was lighter,” he said. “But that’s not particularly helpful [to their teammates].”

Still, some walk-on athletes say they have not encountered serious issues balancing the academic rigors of Harvard with their athletic schedules. It just requires more planning than it would have had they not chosen to walk on to a varsity team.

For Brown—who upon graduation traveled on a Michael C. Rockefeller Fellowship, which he helps administer at Harvard today—it was simple. “I loved school,” said Brown, who was also a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship. “That was the reason I was here.”

Brown said his team had structural regulations in place—including team rules against meetings during shopping period and a ban on practices at certain hours during common class meeting times—to allow athletes more latitude for academic exploration.

Today, walk-on athletes on campus navigate such regulations to balance academics and their team, an effort that sets them apart from their non-varsity peers.

“Athletics makes you a workhorse academically,” Morgan-Scott said. “Academically, during the year you don’t notice it, but you don’t have nearly as much time as the people around you. You’ll leave practice, go to eat, work until you sleep. Crank it out, do what you need to do.”

Despite efforts to balance social and academic changes—however they may vary between individuals and teams—student-athletes walking on to a varsity sport necessarily make a team a large priority.

This choice does not bear lightly upon the fabric of Harvard residential communities that, according to the Harvard Athletic Department website, are composed of nearly 20% varsity athletes. But ultimately, as Brown puts it, walking on is an individual choice with individual social and academic consequences attached.

“How you divide up your time doing some of what you need to do, some of what you want to do, and finding the balance where you’re comfortable is such an individual thing,” Brown said.

—Staff writer Nathan P. Press can be reached at nathan.press@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer  Samuel E. Stone can be reached at samuel.stone@thecrimson.com.