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When former football player David Kiehn was a senior in high school, he received his first call from a recruiter who was hawking what is perhaps Penn's greatest asset -- The Wharton School.

Although Kiehn, now a senior at Penn, never even mentioned an interest in business or even asked about Wharton, the recruiter looked at his high school grades and scores and told him he was a sure bet for admission into arguably the top-ranked business school in the United States.

The recruiter "kind of threw it at me," said Kiehn, who entered Wharton as a freshman and transferred out as a junior, when he quit the football team.

It seems Kiehn is far from alone in his experience.

A Daily Pennsylvanian analysis of the 2000-2001 academic year showed that, while only about 18.3 percent of the entire full-time undergraduate population consisted of Wharton students, several high-profile teams were packed with a much higher percentage.

Within the men's basketball team, 42.9 percent of the squad was made up of Wharton students -- more than double the total percentage of Wharton students in the University at large. And football and wrestling, additionally, contained disproportionately high percentages of Wharton students -- 38.6 percent and 31.6 percent, respectively. The proportion of athletes in women's teams, however, remains far lower than that these popular, crowd-attracting men's sports.

In dozens of interviews, many Wharton athletes, past and present, said they were offered the direct trade of a Wharton diploma for their place on a Penn sports roster. What's more, some of those offered the lucrative degree never even indicated if they had a desire to attend business school.

"I didn't express any interest in [Wharton] at all," said football player Roman Galas, a Wharton junior. "If you're a football player and you're being recruited and you have the grades, you'll get into Wharton, and that's a selling point."

"They sold it to me from the first time they contacted me," said Wharton junior Travis Belden, also a football player. "They let you know right off the bat what kind of chances you have."

For many recruits, who are often the target of coaches from Princeton, Harvard and Yale universities, the possibility of a Wharton acceptance is just the bait they need to be lured away from other athletic teams.

Coaches, both at Penn and at its rivals in the Ivy League, aren't afraid to admit that athletic departments use the most prestigious elements of their institutions to lure their top picks to their teams. The job of recruiters, they say, is simply to sell what you've got.

"Any positive that could give an edge over Princeton and Harvard, we tried to use," said Patrick Baker, a former Penn women's soccer coach.

Added Cornell University football recruiting coordinator Pete DeStefano, "What we have to sell in our league is the engineering and hotel [schools]... We try to use them when we can if a kid's interested."

But while coaches and students testified to the use of Wharton as a recruiting tool, administrators declined to specify the impact recruiting had on the University or Wharton as academic instiutions, only assuring that the process doesn't bring down academic standards. Provost Robert Barchi declined to comment.

But athletic and admissions administrators both assure that the simple fact that coaches use Wharton to build the strongest teams possible doesn't mean admissions standards are waived aside.

"No coach is an admissions officer, so they can't say 'You're getting into Penn,'" Penn Athletics Director Steve Bilsky said, adding that any coach that does so will incur punishment by the Athletic Department and the admissions office.

Bilsky said that while Wharton makes a recruiting situation more attractive for most involved, all recruits have to meet Wharton's rigid academic standards.

"If you have somebody who has outstanding credentials for Wharton, and let's say this person is an athlete, then I think that becomes a very, very positive recruiting situation," he said. "They might not only come to Penn over another Ivy, but they might even come to Penn over a scholarship situation."

Some say that the overwhelming disparity between Wharton students on athletic teams and Wharton students in the general population can easily be explained by the fact that athletes naturally gravitate towards business. The lower percentage of female athletes in Wharton, however, is said to be the result of a traditionally male leaning towards business.

"We wanted to use it as a huge tool, but I thought that there were so few young ladies that would be interested at that time... we tried to use it," Baker said.

When push comes to shove, and the nation's top-recruited athletes are choosing among the most elite schools, many admit that it was the offer of Wharton that brought them to Penn.

"There's no other Ivy League school that has a business school, so that's the trump card," Wharton freshman and soccer player David Maier said.

The Wharton card is almost always played to grab a top recruit, according to former Penn coaches.

"If they're interested in Wharton at all, then obviously you're going to talk up Wharton a lot to try and say 'We've got a chance at getting you into Wharton,'" former women's soccer coach Andy Nelson said.

"Wharton is one of the tops in the country, so I would be remiss to say that we don't lose guys to the Wharton School," DeStefano said.

Some athletes do initially make their business-school preferences known, and coaches often tell them if a Wharton acceptance is likely.

"I expressed interest in going into business and they said that I probably had a pretty good chance," tennis player and Wharton freshman David Lynn said. "I'm guessing they used that as a way to attract me."

"Wharton's probably the best reason to have if you're turning down Harvard," Galas said.

And athletes find it difficult to pass up the opportunity to attend the country's most prestigious business school.

"When they gave me the offer of going to Wharton, they pretty much had me hooked," former women's soccer player and Wharton junior Melissa Mandler said.

Not all athletes in Wharton, however, feel they were lured to Penn with the suggestion of a Wharton acceptance. Many say that their recruiting experience was based mainly on their sport and on student life.

"The coach asked what I was interested in and I told him I was interested in business, so they didn't use it as an incentive," said Wharton junior Ryan Harwood, a member of the tennis team. "It came down to athletics and feeling comfortable socially."

Football coach Al Bagnoli, who oversees a significant number of Wharton atheletes, said he would not even consider recruiting an athlete with sub-par grades and scores.

"Everybody has to fall within certain parameters academically," Bagnoli said. "For the kid to even be considered [for Wharton], he has to have a much better than average math aptitude. If he doesn't have that, he could want Wharton, but it's not a good choice for him and we don't encourage the kid to do it."

When coaches recruit athletes, they forward their recommendations to the admissions office, which ultimately makes the final decision.

"The coaches help by recruiting the athletes and then they present us with a list of people who they'd like to support," Dean of Admissions Lee Stetson said. "We try to do our best by admitting the student athletes that are sought after by the coaches."

And Stetson said he and his staff do not treat athletes any differently in the admissions process.

"We look for the same measures as every other student -- SATs, GPA and contributions to the Penn student body, which would be sports, in the athlete's case," Stetson said.

Each year, there are inevitably some athletes that are more sought-after than others, and some say it is made clear to many of these coveted athletes right from the start that their chances of acceptance into Wharton are high.

"It's up to the administrators and the Athletic Department to decide which sports are going to get Wharton support and I think they base that on the quality of the athlete that's being presented," former Penn assistant men's lacrosse coach Marc van Arsdale said.

"Any kid of that caliber that you're going to want to support for Wharton is going to be heavily recruited by other schools," he added.

Though coaches are permitted to advise an athlete to apply to Wharton, they are banned from assuring an athlete of a guaranteed acceptance.

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