the Year of Glad interview: Hal recruited as ranked body
a regionally, nationally, and continentally ranked junior tennis player, a potential O.N.A.N.C.A.A. athlete of substantial promise, recruited by Coach White
Context
The Admissions Dean reads Hal back to himself off a packet of computer-sheets, and every clause is an institutional coordinate: the three-tier ranking (regional, national, continental) and the O.N.A.N.C.A.A. eligibility that makes him an "athlete of substantial promise" are the machinery that got him into this room. Before Hal is a mind or a person he is a number the governance apparatus can recruit, and the scene's whole engine is that the university wants the ranked body and nothing else.