<p>Hi folks,</p>
<p>My son is trying to get into Florida. He'll finish in the top 10% (barely) of his class so he has Texas as a fall back with their top 10% rule.</p>
<p>Mom and Dad are both Florida alumni and we're hoping that helps if it is tight. While Florida doesn't have a huge rep, it is a good school and has become incredibly difficult to get into with a huge increase in applications. (Not suggesting Ivy difficult, but a boatload harder than it was ten years ago)</p>
<p>The basics of his background. He should just squeeze into the top 10% in class rank in a good 5A (1300 in his Senior class) high school. He has taken 5 AP classes through Junior year and has 6 more on his Senior schedule next year. He scored 1370 on his first pass at the SAT and should be able to get it to 1400 or a bit better.</p>
<p>The ECs are an area we're having a hard time figuring how he stacks up. He enjoyed 4 years at Duke Tip, which isn't exactly an EC, but was something he had a great time with and stuck to over time. He did band from 7th through 9th grade but had to give it up to take baseball in 10th grade. You can't fit band, baseball and a bunch of APs in your schedule. As it is, he's had to take two classes over the summers to fit in his APs during the regular school year.</p>
<p>Baseball is where he makes a huge time commitment. He's played a year on the 9th grade team, two years on JV and will be on Varsity next year. He plays in about 80 games a year with about 200 practices and puts in close to 600 hours a year between playing on school, summer and fall teams and taking lessons. That's a ton to squeeze into a schedule and carry an aggressive academic load. Are the admissions folks going to look at it favorably or chalk it up as "just playing a sport" and wonder where the rest of the ECs are on his resume? Or will they understand how hard it is to compete for time on a varsity roster of a big school and see how much time he's put into to pursuing something he loves.</p>