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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If your kid can dunk a basketball, that's worth a lot.[/quote]
Mine can dunk. Still didn't get a call from Duke.

Many of the best universities - Ivy League, Stanford, Duke, Vanderbilt, Michigan, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Berkeley, even Rice - have serious D1 sports programs. If you are shooting for these schools, unless you are recruitable it doesn't make much sense to devote 20-30 hours a week in high school to a sport. Varsity, travel, and AAU sports are extremely time consuming and come with an enormous opportunity cost. You can't play varsity or club soccer or whatever and be editor in chief of the school newspaper, or president of DECA, or a nationally ranked debater, or compete in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, or do any of the other things that are expected for admissions to T20 schools.

My very good basketball player who can dunk with his teeth but wasn't recruitable at the D1 level decided the time commitment for AAU and varsity was too much. End of sophomore year, he dialed basketball down to rec and focused on other ECs and leadership. And he attends one of the schools listed above - not because he plays basketball, but because he dropped competitive basketball and used his time to, first, do extraordinarily well academically, and second, pursue prominent and interesting ECs that made him stand out to admissions offices. There is no chance he'd be attending a T20 today if he had continued to play basketball at the highest level, even though he was very good.

Being reasonably good at a sport might help for D3 schools. But it does nothing for the super-competitive D1 schools. Non-recruitable high school athletes who are aiming for the most selective D1 schools really do have to make choices. Time is time. There are only 24 hours in a day. Every high school athlete needs to figure out the best use of their time in order to achieve their goals. For most, a sport isn't going to be the best way to get into Duke or Vanderbilt or Stanford or similar. Unless you have Cooper Flagg or Katie Ledecky talent, it's going to be an inefficient use of time when it comes to applying to most T20 schools. [/quote]

I have a kid who was recruited for sports, so I know how that works. I don't know how other ECs work, especially "editor in chief of the school newspaper, or president of DECA, or a nationally ranked debater, or compete in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, or do any of the other things that are expected for admissions to T20 schools."

It is certainly true that your kid has to choose how best to allocate their time. But the assumption appears to be that you can [u]know[/u] before your kid is in high school that they aren't a "recruitable" athlete (and thus they should go do some "other" EC instead). In my experience this is not true. Your athlete kid will most likely have been on a travel team in grade school and middle school. You have a general sense of how good they are, but in most cases you won't know that they are likely to get recruited until sophomore or junior year. In your case, your kid decided for himself to give up sports and do something else. That's fine. But how many parents would be willing to [i]order [/i]their athlete to quit their sport (which they love and have put years of time into) and do some other thing they haven't spent any time on at all, just for the purpose of applying to college? I certainly wouldn't have done that.

As for other types of ECs, how far back do they have to start doing that? Can you become "editor in chief of the school newspaper, president of DECA or a nationally ranked debater" from a cold start in the middle of high school? Apparently your kid starting doing non-sport ECs junior year, but the general consensus is that AOs want to see long-standing passion and depth of commitment. Starting a new EC junior year doesn't really do that.

If your kid is in middle school and you [u]know[/u] that they are (say) "nationally ranked debater" material but only a "very good but not recruitable" athlete, then obviously the kid should focus on debate rather than sport (assuming that's what they want to do). But I don't think most 8th graders (or their parents) have that definite level of knowledge of their potential in sports or other ECs. What if the kid switched from sports to debate but didn't become "nationally ranked"? In that case the kid was no better off than an athlete who didn't get recruited. Is it really all that easy to just [i]choose [/i]to do the kind of "high level" EC that gets you into a T20 school? If so why doesn't every kid do that?

"Unless you have Cooper Flagg or Katie Ledecky talent, it's going to be an inefficient use of time when it comes to applying to most T20 schools." - well life isn't all about perfectly optimizing your time and being totally efficient, especially when you're a high school kid. The kid's interests and passions are a critical factor. If you make them quit sports because "it's not efficient" and go do some other EC that doesn't really interest them, then they will resent you and probably won't succeed in the EC that you forced them to do instead.[/quote]

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