[davewashere]

Athletics is one way high schoolers with less than stellar academic records can navigate past college admissions departments and get accepted at a school where they might not otherwise be qualified. Most people already knew this about scholarship athletes, but the recent college admissions scandal involved non-athletes being listed by college coaches as recruited athletes. It's basically the coach telling the admissions department that this student might play on their team and therefore should get preferential treatment with admissions.

[slg]

This is such a tiny portion of the high school athletics community that is barely worth mentioning. For the vast majority of students participating in sports the only value a sport provides to college admission is as a extracurricular activity. It is no more valuable than being in the school band, acting in the school play, or being a member of the chess club.

[zests]

In my opinion, I'd say being in a "varsity" sport is more valuable than being in an arbitrary club but being in a "club" sport is similar to being in an arbitrary club.

Varsity football in a state like Texas or Florida where football is king? Definitely a huge value add even if you are not going to play football in college.

[thehappypm]

Sports can sometimes show a lot of character, in a different way than things like band or school play do. Think about the amount of hard training it takes to become, for example, a state champion distance runner, or wrestler. It takes more internal strength to run 10 miles every day than to practice the flute.

[pdpi]

> It takes more internal strength to run 10 miles every day than to practice the flute.

That’s utter nonsense. It takes more physical prowess to run 10 miles, sure, but there’s nothing mentally easy about playing the same damn four bars until you have the passage completely locked in, to put in the effort to go from ok to good to excellent.

[thehappypm]

I won’t argue that both take mental prowess. But there’s a difference between overcoming physical hardship and mental tedium.

[brnt]

Ah. "Working hard breeds character". I wish my parents hadn't been such blind working class people to understand that that's merely the way to stay working class.