Okay a bit of parental bragging here… my daughter Maisey just signed with Bryant University in Rhode Island!
(just as her big brother, Dylan, is coming home from the University of Maryland!)
She and I have been working on getting her a scholarship to US university for over 1 1/2 years! I added up all the schools we looked at last night… to one degree or another, we looked at 74 universities! Many of them approached her, some we approached, some she was accepted to, some made good athletic offers, some made good academic offers, some implied they would make offers, but made nothing at all.
Maisey Kent, Fastest “Naked Woman” 2009
She was accepted to 3 Canadian universities. She applied and was accepted to U of Toronto, Guelph and Carlton. Easy peasy.
But to find just the right school in the US is so much more difficult. First of all, most schools will take you if you have decent marks… but getting one to pay you to go to their school is much harder.
Secondly, we have about 40 universities in Canada… they have over 4,000 in the US.
And thirdly, the variables are almost incalculable… you want: a good school… with a good swim team… who will give you a good amount of academic and or athletic money… in a nice city… that’s not too big or too small… or too remote… and it should have a guys team and a girls swim team… and you don’t want to be the fastest on the team or the slowest… with a decent pool and facilities… a good coach… and tight knit team… lots of seniors graduating is a good thing too so that they are looking for lots of freshmen… and do you early-sign or wait until spring… and hopefully in Maisey’s case, they are looking for a freestyle and backstroker… and a school that isn’t too expensive too start with… and allows “stacking” athletic and academic scholarships… and has the right level of SAT scores… and one that we can go visit and that she can come home to for holidays. Oh and all of this has to be done within the very strict boundaries of the NCAA rules. You get the idea.
Let’s just say it was tough and emotional… and to add a bit more drama, it came down to the day before the NLI (national letter of intent) expired… essentially Maisey had to make up her mind by April 30… and we didn’t get the final numbers from Bryant until April 29!
But to quote the famous line from Captain Mathew Webb, the first man to swim the English Channel, “nothing great is easy!”
Bryant is a small, beautiful and very modern and well funded school in Providence, Rhode Island. It is 150 years old, but the founder of “Tupperware” is an alumni and he donated an entire campus… so it is almost all new, with the exception of a few old buildings they moved there. (the mascot’s name is “Tupper”!) It has the 27 best business school in the US (Maisey is planning on taking International Business/Studies). They have a great program that stresses balance and being well balanced. They require students, if they are taking a liberal arts degree to minor in business… or if you are taking business to minor in liberal arts. And Rhode Island, well, I’d never been there… but it is gorgeous. In fact it looks a lot like old Oakville… or all the nice areas of Boston.
Maisey and Rob… The Duel in The Lake! (2012)
It was the glass slipper that happened to fit Maisey perfectly. And she was bouncing off the walls yesterday she was so excited!
Just like when we all train for some big race, it’s nice to see when people are rewarded for their hard work… and it’s even better when it happens to your kids. I’m just really happy for her.
Okay a bit of parental bragging here… my daughter Maisey just signed with Bryant University in Rhode Island! 
