Lacrosse and Wall Street

Interesting article in today's Wall Street Journal regarding the influence of college lacrosse alumni on Wall Street and how a college lacrosse experience might help one on Wall Street (both the competition part and the networking with influential alumni part). Read the whole thing and let me know your thoughts on the article.

Most certainly, the article will reinforce the views of those who believe that lacrosse is an elitist sport (although the growing influence of the sport around the country would suggest otherwise). Perhaps the ticket to Wall Street is not so much a degree from an Ivy League college or a prestigious New England liberal arts college, but some measure of success at those schools or others in lacrosse (with "success" for these purposes, at least at some of the major lacrosse schools, being loosely defined as having made them team and, therefore, having a ticket to an influential alumni network).

For example, who has the best odds of getting the initial good job and then succeeding on Wall Street:

a) the math genius from Bronx High School of Science who majored in mathematics at Princeton and whose closest connection to the pretty significant athletic influence at Princeton is i) participation in his residential college's annual March Madness pool and ii) freshman year a soccer player lived next door to him;

b) the economics major at Dartmouth who played club lacrosse (not to be confused with varsity lacrosse), had a 3.65 GPA in economics and whose father heads up a big department at an investment bank;

c) a second-team all-Ivy lacrosse player at Cornell who had a 2.3 GPA in agricultural economics in Cornell's Agriculture School (despite coming from a congested part of Long Island which, last we checked, no longer has a significant farming presence);

d) the star midfielder (and first-team all-American) at Maryland, who grew up playing lacrosse at a private school in Baltimore and who had a 3.0 GP in his kinesiology major; or

e) the captain of the division III championship women's basketball team who had a 3.9 GPA in applied mathematics, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and hails from that great hoops state (not) of Maine?

And, I guess, in the end, how much should we care?