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[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]

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