The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League–Obsessed Parents

Updated at 7:25 p.m. ET on November 1, 2020 and at 4:20 p.m. on June 26, 2025.

Editor’s Note: After The Atlantic published this article, new information emerged that raised serious concerns about its accuracy, and about the credibility of the author, Ruth Shalit Barrett.

We have decided to retract this article. We cannot attest to the trustworthiness and credibility of the author, and therefore we cannot attest to the veracity of the piece in its entirety.

We draw a distinction between retraction and removal. We believe that scrubbing the article from the internet would not meet our standards for transparency, and we believe it is important to preserve access to the article for the historical record. We have decided to take down the online version but to make available a PDF of the article as it appears in our November 2020 issue.

We have established that Barrett deceived The Atlantic and its readers about a section of the story that concerns “Sloane,” who The Atlantic agreed to identify by her middle name to protect her daughters’ privacy and college-recruitment chances.

The original version of this article stated that Sloane has a son. Before publication, Sloane confirmed this detail with The Atlantic’s fact-checking department. After publication, when a Washington Post media critic asked us about the accuracy of portions of the article, our fact-checking department reached out to Sloane to recheck certain details. Through her attorney, Sloane informed us that she does not have a son, a fact we then independently corroborated.

Sloane’s attorney told The Atlantic that Sloane had misled the magazine because she had wanted to make herself less readily identifiable —and that Barrett had proposed the invention of a son as a way to protect her anonymity.

When we asked Barrett about these allegations, she eventually admitted that she was “complicit” in “compounding the deception” and that “it would not be fair to Sloane” to blame her alone for deceiving The Atlantic. Barrett denies that the invention of a son was her idea, and denies advising Sloane to mislead The Atlantic’s fact-checkers, but told us that “on some level I did know that it was BS” and “I do take responsibility.”

Sloane’s attorney claimed that there are several other errors about Sloane in the article but declined to provide examples. Barrett says that the fabricated son is the only detail about which she deceived our fact-checkers and editors.

During the initial fact-checking process, we corroborated many details of Sloane’s story with sources other than Sloane. But the checking of some details of Sloane’s story relied solely on interviews and other communications with Sloane or her husband or both of them.

In reviewing the article again after publication, before we retracted it, our fact-checking department identified several additional errors: We corrected the characterization of a thigh injury (originally described as a deep gash but more accurately described as a skin rupture that bled through a fencing uniform); the location of a lacrosse family mentioned in the article (they do not live in Greenwich, Connecticut, but in another town in Fairfield County); and a characterization of backyard hockey rinks as “Olympic-size” (the private rinks are large, but not Olympic-size).

Originally, we referred to the author of the article as Ruth S. Barrett. When writing recently for other magazines, Barrett was identified as either Ruth S. Barrett or by her full name, Ruth Shalit Barrett. (Barrett is her married name.) In 1999, when she was known by Ruth Shalit, a high-profile scandal at The New Republic involving a different author, Stephen Glass, generated extensive news coverage. Some of the articles about the Glass scandal referenced incidents in 1994 and 1995 in which plagiarism and inaccuracies were found in Ms. Barrett’s reporting. Ms. Barrett says she elected to leave the magazine as a result. In the interest of transparency, we should have included the name that she used as her byline in the 1990s. We have changed the byline on this article to Ruth Shalit Barrett.

We decided to assign Barrett this freelance story in part because more than two decades had separated her from her journalistic malpractice at The New Republic and because in recent years her work has appeared in reputable magazines. We were wrong to make this assignment, however. It reflects poor judgment on our part, and we regret our decision.

Our fact-checking department thoroughly checked this piece, speaking with more than 40 sources and independently corroborating information. But we now know that the author misled our fact-checkers, lied to our editors, and is accused of inducing a source to lie to our fact-checking department. We believe that these actions fatally undermined the effectiveness of the fact-checking process. It is impossible for us to vouch for the accuracy of this article. This is what necessitated a full retraction. We apologize to our readers.

* This Editor’s Note was updated on June 26, 2025 to conform more closely to the Editor’s Note that we published in our January/February 2021 print edition, and to clarify that: "Sloane" was an anonymous source; Ms. Barrett says that she elected to leave The New Republic; and Ms. Barrett did not ask The Atlantic to use a novel byline.