When Canadian elite Allie Forbes was 11 years old, her oldest sister Katie went on a visit to Yale and brought her home a gymnastics cap. Forbes cherished the gift and Yale became her dream school. It was a distant dream, though—so distant that she didn’t fully grasp that she could attend Yale as a student-athlete until much later.
It was only last year, when some friends from her own province of Alberta got recruited to NCAA gymnastics teams, that Forbes decided to start her own recruiting process. She sent out her first email in March 2023, engaged in correspondence with different schools and took unofficial visits in the summer. Since she values academic excellence as much as sports—her sister is a Princeton graduate—she paid visits to the four Ivy League schools with gymnastics teams: Brown, Cornell, Penn, and Yale. Although she enjoyed them all, it was Yale where she felt most at home.
“On my official visit to Yale, in September, I instantly felt like I was part of the team, which only further strengthened my desire to attend the school,” Forbes explained. “When [head coach] Andy [Leis] offered me a spot, I said yes immediately, and could not stop smiling for the rest of the day. While it was definitely stressful at times, I could not be happier…
