Reply to Reducing the academic load to play elite soccer.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think that children will always have an optimistic view of their own talents.  It is up to parents to decide how to focus the children on the right path.  Parents have an obligation to really stop and consider how much talent their child really has and help guide their child to the right priorities.

Here are some numbers:
[url]http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/estimated-probability-competing-college-athletics[/url]
[url]https://www.ncaa.org/sites/default/files/Recruiting%20Fact%20Sheet%20WEB.pdf[/url]

In general, with only a few exceptions, well under 10% of high school athletes will compete at the NCAA level.  And of those, only about 1/3 of those will compete at the Div-I, Div-II and Div-III levels.  And of those, only about 1-2% will go to compete at the professional level.  In soccer, the numbers are about 6% of high school participants will play NCAA and about 1.4% of those will play professional.  So that means out of 440K high school soccer players, less than 400 will play professionally.

So, do you want to prioritize the sport or academics?  Yes, it is important to have balance, but moving from a higher rated school to a lower rated school just to play athletics to get into a collegiate athletic program is not wise.  Instead, why not stay in the higher rated school and play a lower level/tier of athletics.  Your child will still get their balance from sport/academics and will have a better foundation for college.

And if you want to know why this is significant, go look at the thread about the shortage of "economically attractive" men.  [b]Ex-college sports stars who are making less money because they focused on athletics instead of academics [/b]are a dime a dozen and are less attractive for marriage, so if having that job, family and stability is important, then they may want to reassess their priorities.

My nephew did make the one decision that made sense.  He was a cross-country runner.  He went to a good high school and still competed.  He did go to a school on a track scholarship, but he deliberately chose a school with a good engineering program and a lesser NCAA division track team so that he could focus on academics at the collegiate level.  He found the pressure to compete less intense so that he could still compete, but the sports program did place an emphasis on maintaining the academics and made allowances for athletes around their academic requirements, which was exactly what he wanted.[/quote]

This is exactly the opposite of true.

The large majority of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies were college athletes.

College athletes get access to internships that are not available to other students.

NCAA athletes GPAs are higher than the rest of the population. 
[/quote]

I think too many are focusing on the cream of the crop.  Yes, it does happen that there are many executives and high end earners in many fields who did pursue college athletics.  But here are 500 Fortune 500 CEOs.  And there are maybe a few thousand athletes who benefited from legacy-type internships, mostly at the more prestigious schools.

In reality, there are 7.3 million high school athletes of which about 500K pursue college athletics and about 8-10K who make it into professional sports.  That means in every generation of about 4 years, there are 6.5M high school athletes who will not play college athletics; there are about 7.2M who will not make it into professional sports.  If you are one of those who played college level athletics but don't go into professional sports you are one of about 490K in each generation.  How many of those do you really think are getting CEO, high level finance, MBA or wall street jobs?  Probably less than 10%.  There are another 5-10% who end up coaching, training, or otherwise working in their sport, often for very moderate (at most) salaries.  Over 80% of those who played college athletics are stuck relying on their academic credentials the same as their peers who concentrated on academics instead of athletics and they are often behind those peers in credentials because the prioritized athletics and athletic accomplishments to academic ones.

You want to hear what happens to the other 80%?  They are stuck trying to find their way.  Here is one such example and this guy was a top competitor in his sport.  He was working for $8 an hour as an intern to get into a sportscaster job which starts at $28K and up.  The average sportscaster in the US earns $39K.  The ones that make it on national chains including ESPN, SI, etc are the exception, not the rule.
[url]http://www.espn.com/espnw/voices/article/15182997/moving-sports-college-athlete-greatest-challenge[/url][/quote]

Dude! [u]We are only talking about the cream of the crop.[/u] If you are a top athlete is it okay to cut back on academics?

That is the only question on this thread. Nobody is suggesting average soccer p!ayers cut back on academics.[/quote]

No you are not.  You are talking about the big fish in the little pond.  That's a far cry from the cream of the crop.  As has been pointed out there are 7.5 million high school students in athletics.  There are just under 500K that play college sports.  Even those are not the cream of the crop.  The cream of the crop are the the 10K or so that will work professionally in the sport, that includes those who become professional athletes, coaches, trainers.  Even those who are recruited to pay college athletics number well over 100K and less than 10% of those will be the cream of the crop.

If you think that talented high school athletes who might be scouted for a collegiate scholarship are the cream of the crop, then you are sadly mistaken and possibly misleading your teenager.  Go back and read the story of that top NCAA collegiate tennis athlete above.  He had a top-10 national ranking in NCAA collegiate stars and was on the traveling US national collegiate team.  And he never made it to the pros.  He placed a higher priority on his athletics than his academics and he will be behind on life for his lifetime for not placing a priority on his academics.  Since OP started about soccer stars, just under 500K kids play high school soccer.  Under 25K play collegiate soccer (so about 5.6%).  1.4% of those playing collegiate soccer will play professional soccer, so about 350.  Maybe another 500 or so will find jobs working in professional soccer like trainers or coaches.  Nearly 24K of those playing collegiate soccer will have to find work unrelated to soccer.  Let's say another 500-1000 will get the bonus of going to a school with legacy internships as posted above.  They'll do fine.  Those are the types that will end up doing something lucrative because of the "networking" provided by their school.  Another 20-22K collegiate soccer players will have no benefit of working in the sport or legacy networking.  And will have to do something based on their collegiate background.

But the problem is that the majority of those players will be bound by their collegiate program to prioritize their athletics over the academics in the hope that they'll be one of the lucky ones.  And so many of them will end up with a college career of mediocre academic results and less than average understanding of their collegiate fields due to lack of attention to their academic program and will struggle to find direction in their career and life.[/quote]

You are obviously correct, but I think the PP thinks that playing DA in high school automatically means his kid is going to be an MLS star.[/quote]

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