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Anonymous wrote:To sum up: Participate in sports because you love to compete, love the camaraderie of teamwork, the personal challenge, the physical activity. Playing a sport is one of the best things one can do with one's time.
But do not participate in sports thinking it will help all that much for college applications, unless being recruited to play on the college level. There is really not more to it than this.
False. That’s not a summary at all.
That’s your personal option again that sports, esp team sports, take up too much time.
You’re wrong because there are scholar athletes everywhere who are attractive candidates for colleges and who don’t desire to play college sports, but club or other college ECs and focus on their majors, study abroad, internships, networking and friends.
Get over it OP. Not everyone wants to sit on their butt coding or doing hours of robotics.
Honestly the same thing can be said about robotics... and pretty much everything else
The amount of time dedication and talent it takes to turn robotics into an extracurricular activity that is noticably more impressive than varsity sports is huge.
You want to build a competitive robot for the FIRST or Vex competition? That one activity crowds out pretty much everything else.
You want to get invited to the USAMO? You are going to be spending almost all your time on it.
You want to be a regeneron semifinalist, forget about the USAMO or robotics or the football team.
The academic extracurriculars are important to have, but if you aren't pointy (winning at least at the state level), it doesn't really help that much, you might as well touch some grass.
And yet every year, IVY+ takes kids that aren't winning competitions or being recruited athletically.
If you don't get in, maybe you are actually better off elsewhere.
Np. I feel like you guys need a primer on what AO are looking for. They seem SOOO may Robotics/Vex/USAMO - it doesn't even phase them anymore. They are bored when they read those applications.
Really?
There are 223 students that qualify for USAMO in the country.
If you qualify for USAMO and you have good stats, you have a good chance at any school.
First Robotics Competition has 100 Dean's List finalists. This is significantly more impressive than varsity sports, (not as impressive as USAMO for most purposes).
Vex Robotics has 32 teams with an average of 6 players per team for about 200 students (slightly less impressive than FRC Dean's List).
USAMO especially is a big deal.
I know kids who got into MIT with almost no other EC (they were struggling to fill out that section of their application).
They had great stats 1550+ SAT and near perfect GPA but qualifying for the USAMO was their main activity.
They didn't even qualify for MOP
This makes doing robotics or math sound like an
even worse idea than doing varsity sports.
Your kid will put ALL his time into robotics or math and have an even worse chance of being a winner/finalist than a varsity athlete has of being recruited.
300,000 students take the AMC exam each year. Of them, 3,000 qualify for the AIME. Of them, 250 qualify for the USAMO. Thus you have a 0.0.8% chance to qualify for USAMO. Meanwhile 7% of high school varsity athletes are recruited (even higher for some sports) - basically 100x the odds of being a successful athlete than of being a successful math geek.
86,700 high school kids competed in the 2024 First Robotics. If there are 100 Dean's List finalists then you have an 0.1% chance of being a finalist, much lower than the odds of being recruited as an athlete.
Yes if you qualify for USAMO or are a First Robotics finalist that's huge but it's like being recruited to play D1 basketball. Awesome if it happens but the odds of achieving that are extraordinarily low. For the overwhelming majority of kids, math or robotics is (to echo the criticism about sports if you don't get recruited) a poor investment of time and is "just another EC" that didn't make them stand out at all.
This entire thread isn't about recruited athletes...it's the unrecruited athletes.
Considering 8 million...YES MILLION...play sports, 86,700 kids is actually a tiny number of kids participating in robotics.
This has been interesting to read, the ongoing debate of how valuable sports is as an EC. From the perspective of a parent of a very high academic kid who is also a recruited athlete I would like to say that it is more nuanced than the discussion makes it out to be. What I haven't seen mentioned at all is impact for any given EC. Any kid doing a typical EC whether it is sports or robotics has to have impact for it to be a useful EC. Neither the HS kid who is sort of playing a sport nor the kid just participating in robotics club, or math club, or debate has a great EC because they aren't at the top in any way, their ECs lack impact.
For kids very shooting for top schools sports can be an exception EC but the key is understanding both their athletic potential and their academic potential early enough to make the connections.
If you pick the top 25 or so universities and the top 15-20 SLACs you only have about 10 schools with major sports programs, the rest are IVY, NESCAC, UAA, etc. schools with very strong commitments to athletics but at a level that is approachable for mere mortals. These schools also have recruiting standards that are very high with not a huge amount of ground given in terms of academics. Some is but far less than most people believe because most of their exposure is to P4 sports.
The Ivy League has their Academic Index, the NESCAC has banding and the UAA sort of follows the NESCAC. What this means is that they have recruiting rules and the general result of the rules is that most kids don't qualify academically.
If you start with directionally accurate but rough math is goes:
Assume a 1450 SAT is needed (its much higher for many schools) so 97th pct.
18,000 female volleyball players (assume curve of SAT) only about 540 girls cross that bar
The athletic programs are strong at these schools most kids won't be nearly good enough to play so cut the above number in half now 270 girls; the funnel quickly narrowed and ruled most kids out.
So out of 18,000 female volleyball players there are less than 300 potential recruits.
25 programs would need about 4+ kids per year so the odds of a NESCAC, or Ivy or UAA school is very high once you cross both bars.
My Daughter was 1560 SAT, with about a dozen APs and played for a nationally ranked team, and she had many (over 10) offers.
For my kid sports was a great EC because we could judge her academic and athletic skills while in middle school. She had other solid ECs and she is academically strong enough to go anywhere. We'll never know of course but I am not sure that we would have got better results if she had committed to an academically focused EC. The path for other families in the same situation could differ but my kid developed alot of life skills around mental toughness, time management, teamwork, leadership, etc. that will serve her well in life.
You sound like you’re describing a show pony or judging a dog at Westminster.
No, not really
Yes. Really.
God forbid you encourage your child to have hobbies that interest them and make them happy. Nope. It’s all about appealing to those judges to get that coveted best in show so everyone will marvel at the breeding and handler…
You're making an assumption, a poor one. Her life was the opposite of what you described.
The thread is "do not let them play sports in high school". I pointed out that one sided view could be misguided, like much of well meaning but misguided advice. My kid did lots of things that I didn't mention in my post, but she did them because she wanted to, they weren't manufactured.
She was a member of French club but didn't have to obsess over becoming an officer to demonstrate leadership.
She had over 1,000 hours of volunteer time at a local hospital because a 4 hours shift every other week isn't really that onerous and she wants to go into medicine.
She volunteered with friends at a foodbank; because filling/emptying boxes was an easy way to complete service hours and it was kind of like hanging out.
She worked multiple different jobs, mostly summers but also during school breaks and to fill in sometimes because that is how she gets things beyond her allowance.
We/she also learned a lot during the process
We learned details about admissions because it starts after your sophomore year if you are considering D1 sports
We learned that academics are still very important for top schools
We learned that the requirements at the Ivy's is lower than the NESCAC, UAA, JHU, MIT etc., and the Patriot league is still lower.
We learned that we had to work and take the SAT early. She took her SAT after her sophomore year because JHU and MIT will literally not talk to you until you have a 1500 plus to show them.
We learned that rigor matters and that at MIT the expectation is to always take the hardest course available to you and excel at it; athlete or not. We also learned that you don't get extra credit for adding courses 7/8 to your schedule. They really would prefer that you do something else as you have crossed the academic bar.
We learned that test scores matter everywhere but everywhere is different. MIT wanted a 770M, JHU wants a 1500 composite, WashU said that her 780 wasn't interesting ("everyone comes with a high math score") but 780V would be a big plus with the admissions office.
We learned that honors courses don't carry much value (too variable) but AP courses do. And, if you take the course you need to take the test or else the grade is suspect.
But most of all we learned about what I mentioned at the beginning of my original post. Whatever you do for ECs; have impact. Passion and significance is what matters; it doesn't matter so much what the EC is, it matters what you do with it.
Someone above stated that they spoke to 3 different counselors who said not to play sports if you weren't recruitable. They either asked the question wrong or they should find new counselors. Years of dedication, moving up the ranks, leading and playing on a top team is an excellent EC and a good counselor knows how to work with that to show the impact on the player and those around them. Impact in the EC is what matters, more than the EC itself. My daughters Co-captain wasn't recruitable as a player but she is at a T30ish school today.
The MIT "Applying Sideways" blog should be read and taken to heart by everyone in this process. Find something that you love, run with it, become great at it, and demonstrate how it impacts a wider community.
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