Reply to If your kid wants to go to a selective university, do not let them play sports in high school

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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]

In fairness, many of the AAU teams are basically the "cut" if you are D1 or not

Go look at Team Durant.  Every kid on that team has multiple D1 offers...many Power 4.  They are also the star players for Sidwell, PVI, Gonzaga, etc.[/quote]

Another variability with D1 level basketball is growth spurts in high school. You can't count or plan on these things. I'm the poster above with the kid with the hops. But [b]he maxed out at 6'2. And 6'2 forwards don't play D1[/b]. Basketball in particular is probably the toughest sport when it comes to D1 recruiting. It's generally not a great investment in time for smart kids looking to go T20 schools.  [/quote]

Unless they are Steph Curry...but I guess he's not a forward (though he is 6'2").[/quote]

He got one offer and his father is Dell Curry. [/quote]

and it was D3.[/quote]

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