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[quote=Anonymous]My experience was that if you look across freshman, JV and Varsity teams, you could plot kids on an a graph with natural athleticism (speed, size, recovery, agility, coordination) on the X axis and work ethic/determination on the Y axis.

So at a school like you describe, the very top right would be kids who will get major conference D1 offers and a very few who have realistic thoughts of playing professionally.  The bottom left are kids who won’t make the freshman team.

The freshman team will include mostly kids high on the work ethic axis and not as high on the natural gifts side — assuming they’ve had that work ethic for years, done travel teams, private training, and done all available open gym type training.  JV will be a mix with the older JV players being more on the work side.  Varsity will include kids with both natural gifts and a lot of hard work, with some outliers of kids who work absurdly hard to sit on the bench and absolute freak athletes who may not work as hard as they could.

My kid was one of the hard work outliers - he decided in elementary school that he wanted to play for his high school, which happened to be a huge public that always dominates and is usually ranked in the top 25 nationally.  Through a combination of like 25+ hours a week of training (not counting travel time or time between games at tournaments) and a big growth spurt, he made his HS varsity team.

It was honestly kinda miserable.  He wanted a team experience with the chance to play in front of his classmates and win for the school - like you see in the movies.  What he found was a culture where everybody was focused on the next level all the time — everything was about college recruiting, that’s all coaches talked about, and all kids focused on.  The team rolled over most opponents, so kids goofed around in games and still won by huge margins, and they celebrated beating bad teams really obnoxiously.  When they played another top ranked team and lost, it was all a blame game.  Also, my kid was devoting every waking minute to training to be one of the worst players on varsity.  He quit after sophomore year, and now says he wish he’d quit earlier.

The one positive outcome is that he knows he can do hard things.  He’s taught himself to do some cool stuff (academically and in art and music), and he totally credits his sports experience for giving him the patience, determination, and emotional control to be OK at being bad at something new and sticking with it. [/quote]

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