Reply to Why do people allow kids to play sports at the expense of academics?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Some people wrongly believe that the kids will get scholarships, when in fact only 2% of high school kids get sports scholarships to college.[/quote]

Just as an aside -- this "fact" which is often bandied about when discussing kids and sports is not really relevant for any sport other than football which has no club/travel side.

The reality is that college recruitment is done out of club and travel sports.  College coaches may well pay attention to high school basketball (particularly girls where AAU options are fewer), and will absolutely look at certain times achieved in (some) meets, but in most situations and sports, college coaches will be watching and recruiting out of club/travel.

Now -- within club/travel sports there are obviously multiple layers based on competitive ability.  Of course, not every kid on a "top team" is good enough to play/compete at a high level in college, and not every kid on a lower level team is unable to compete at a high level in college.  And, there are multiple levels of play post-high school:  Professional (particularly in baseball and hockey (juniors)), Div I, Div II, Div III, NAIA and Junior College.  Scholarships are handled differently at every level and by sport, and Div III has no athletic scholarships (nor does the Ivy League which competes at Div I levels for most of their sports).

My daughter plays soccer in college and I have a son who is a junior and going through the recruitment process now so I am most familiar with that sport.  All but 4 of the girls (out of 20) on her uu17 and u18 club teams went on to play in college.  The 4 who did not could have played at smaller schools, but each elected to go to a large school and not play.  Was there something "magic" about that team?  No.  It was probably the 3rd or 4th best team in the state that we lived in at the time.  The top 5 or so teams would have about the same ration of kids going on to play in college, and, of course, other kids would move on from other teams that were not quite as competitive.  There are a lot of opportunities out there, but in girls soccer you know pretty early where you stand (recruiting is well underway in the kids' sophomore year and pretty much done by this time in the girls' junior year - at least for Div I as scholarship money gets committed).  For boys it is a little later as they physically mature later.  With the exception of the very top level players, coaches are more willing to wait until the junior year and beginning of senior year.  Again though, on my son's team which is not a Development Academy team (the top level of boys' youth soccer) about half the kids are looking at partial scholarship offers now.

TLDR - No one should care about what percent of kids playing in high school go on to play in college or get an athletic scholarship.  That is not the pool from which college athletes are recruited (aside from football).  While obviously such things are very individually based, if you were a parent with a 10 year old who you think might want to play in college the statistics to look at would be the percentage of kids playing/competing at level X in my kid's sport who go on to play/compete in college.  And, can my kid compete at level X.  (Lots of kids play club/travel sports for reasons other than trying to get a college scholarship -- fun being the most important, but also for something to do in the summer, or to be able to make a high school team, or to get/stay in shape, etc. . .

[/quote]

This was a very long digression that is really beside the point.  OP was never making a distinction about where kids play sports, just that she didn't understand why some parents seemed to value sports over academics.

The fact is very small percentage of high school aged kids get scholarships -- whether they're recruited playing for a school or club team.  It's a great anecdote that your kids and their friends are being recruited to play soccer from their semi-high level teams, but it's not really representative of anything.  [/quote]

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