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[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]

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