Definitely volleyball on that list @GoatMama! Strategy too right?
One big knock against crew is it requires a certain physique, something beyond the control of the student. My own kid used to lament that it wasn’t even an option, being to slight to a serious contender and not small enough to be a coxswain.
The OP mentioned her son wanting to pick up wrestling. With the different weight classes, its easier for kids of different sizes to fin their niche in the sport. It also allows for flexibility during the learning and growth process as one can move up in weight class. Most freshman boys won’t necessarily have a clear picture of where they will ultimately be growth-wise so that flexibility is a plus. The decision making and strategy involved also give an edge to a bright student.
@GoatMama – I like the list. Generally I agree with it. MMA is probably in place of boxing in today’s world. The one I do not agree with is football. Except for a couple of positions, this is all about how you were born genetically. Any one can play the line if you are large and fast enough.
To me – one thing that goes against a sport is how late can you pick up the sport and play at a high level.
RE: Wrestling. One of my wrestling friends likes to say his son is “gifted” in wrestling because he will never get above 120 lbs. Being naturally
@SevenDad and @london203 ROFLMAO on the rowing. The training alone for crew knocks out a lot of kids.
Rowing is just brutally hard. As in be in top physical shape, row, row row, and throw up. No, it doesn’t require the IQ like hockey where you need to see the ice three dimensionally and anticipate events or have insane hand-eye. But it is just HARD!
@sadieshadow most of these schools have many teams. I would make sure sports that are a good fit I.e team verses individual are available. I would check on the requirements: I.e three season, two season, can you substitute things like yoga or fitness, and lastly will he have fun and learn some new skills (is the school a cultural fit)
My non-athletic not-sporty kid loves Outdoor team.
Canoeing, hiking, mountain biking, etc, basically the same as boy scouting activities in the moutain states.
I remember Mercersberg had Outdoor education too.
He can swim too but probably too slow for the swim team.
@doschicos how small must a coxswain be?
You can read about coxswain and weight here, @onthewestfence which will give you more info than I can type up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coxswain_(rowing)
There is a minimum weight (I think 100 for high school boats, less than what is listed in the link). I don’t think they prefer to go too much over than minimum to give them a weight advantage but of course there are other factors to consider for a coxswain besides weight. I’ve seen some boys’ boats use female coxswains, I assume because they had the right combo of weight as mental, personal, and strategic makeup that was lacking in any male student possibilities. And, of course, they want someone who is not one season from away from some huge growth spurt because they haven’t gone through puberty yet.
I’m not an expert on crew but have hung around enough over the decades to pick up a little knowledge. Some here might be able to add more color.
One thing that surprises me about kids’ sports today is how young they start. It used to be rare for a kid to have much experience playing a sport like lacrosse or hockey before HS, unless they came from certain parts of the country. Now there are a lot of sports that are basically impossible to take up in HS, or even past the age of 8 or 9. I think that’s really too bad.
One of the nice things about BS is that it seems like sports take a very healthy role in the students’ lives. These are relatively small schools fielding a lot of teams, so there are opportunities for students to pick up a new sport and enjoy it, without being shut out because of the competitiveness of the club sport/college recruitment mill. Also, kids can’t play only one sport all year long. I say all of this as a mom of kids who aren’t serious athletes; obviously that’s a different set of considerations.
My daughter has never made a varsity team at her BS, but sports have been one of her favorite experiences there.
@friendlymom – you are exactly right. The Race to Nowhere that is so prevalent in education is also deeply rooted in sports. For example, a friend from high school in NH started hacking with a soccer ball in middle school and by the time he was 18 he was able to make D1 soccer team at Dartmouth.
Fast forward to today, a lot of kids play soccer year round in Boston and join a club by 8 years old. This means they are playing 6 days a week. They are training to do high level moves by Messi by the time they are 10 - 12. And at 13 (if they are good) are traveling on the weekends 2 - 4 hours one way for games of 1 hour.
BS (and DS) force a some what rational approach to sports.
As a general rule, the smaller the school within this peer group, the greater the focus and attention will be paid on “visible” activities. Sports and performing arts are on the top of this list.
Every kid, no matter where he or she goes to school, looks for a niche in high school. It’s an important part of growing up–finding out who you are and where you belong. Many kids enter high school with a certain expectation of their niche, but the best places, in my opinion, help them figure out what else is out there and growing beyond that.
All of the schools we considered for our kid had very strong sports, superior to her current private day school but inferior, generally, to the LPS. Most of this is simply scale. And while she will be a varsity athlete as a freshman, we also really liked the elements of balance that were stressed by the coaches and exploring all sorts of things unrelated to her primary sport. Part of this was a means of combating burnout, and part of it was an awareness of growth process for adolescents mentioned above.
So while the sports component of the prep school decision was absolutely crucial, within that we were very sensitive to sports within the greater school context, not the school in the greater context of the sport or the coach, which I would imagine for a PG or future D1 superstar, may be the case.
I agree. There are no team sports that kids can participate at a recreational level after middle school.
DS1 stopped soccer at 5th grade (was it 4th grade?) because beyond that meant training and traveling all over the state for competes that we were not able to support.
Middle schoolers go to Brazil, etc, for training. High schoolers have a profile of past training.
Middle school lacrosse players go to Canada for tournaments.
Ice hockey starts at 3 years old around here. 
I wonder, then, what fuels the availability of “team sports for all” at most boarding schools. I guess it’s a combination of the relatively small size of the student body, along with the school having the monetary resources to field multiple teams in each sport. Just to pick a skill-based sport somewhat at random, I just counted the number of girls who participate in interscholastic lacrosse at my kids’ school. Last spring, 65 girls played lacrosse (totaling the rosters of Varsity, JV, and thirds). There are about 200 girls at the school, so almost 1 in every 3 girls was on a lacrosse team. By comparison, the excellent, well-funded public high schools in my area typically have about 2000 students, so roughly 1000 girls. To give every 1 in 3 girls a chance to play lacrosse, the school would have to field 15 teams, which of course would be preposterous (who ever heard of Fifteenths Lacrosse?). And I’m talking about well-funded public high schools, obviously the opportunities are less at many schools.
So if you’re a not terribly athletically inclined girl who’s never played lacrosse before, but likes to do something active with friends, you’re not going to try out for the lacrosse team at the local public high school, as it would basically be almost ridiculous to do so (presumably out of 1000 girls, there are least 65 of them who actually do play lacrosse). But if you’re that same girl at a boarding school, then you may very well decide it would be fun to give lacrosse a try.
Now, if I could only get my daughter to buy into that reasoning! (though to be fair, she did play thirds volleyball and club ice hockey this year, never having played either of those sports before in her life)
It may have something to do with the boarding school ethos that sports are CO-curricular vs. EXTRA-curricular – well, that and no boarding school wants cooped up board teenagers around! 
At one of our college tours, in the gym, the tour guide said they have many levels of sports teams, e.g. for Ice Hockey all the way down to a team for someone who cannot skate nor hit the puck. It sounds a little worse than pee wee hockey 
Some larger schools have intra-scholastic teams, i.e., teams which compete with other teams enrolled at the same school. I believe Lawrenceville does this.
I have read that there was a big push to consolidate public school districts, on the grounds that a larger district would be able to offer more extracurriculars. To use soxmom’s example, I think it would be better to attend a small school and play on the lacrosse team, than to attend a much larger school, but not be able to participate in sports at all.
I remember classmates starting team sports in high school, back in the day. I do not think the current rage for specialization does children any favors.
At any rate, even if a student enters boarding school as a good hockey player, he’s (she’s) still only 14. Students do change their opinions about activities–and if they’re at boarding school, you have no way to force them to participate. Every year, some students who were stars in their previous schools do not make Varsity (or even Junior Varsity.) The first weeks of any season can be emotional times. However, given that a minuscule percentage of high school athletes ever play professional sports, most students manage to find something they like to do.
In terms of college placement, I think most (generalization) boarding school parents have their eyes on a well-rounded education. Thus, the outstanding boarding school players are attractive to colleges because they are well prepared for the classroom, as well as the playing field.
There are specialty boarding schools at which students are aiming for professional careers: ski academies, golf academies, hockey academies, basketball academies. I don’t know anything about them, other than that they exist.
Lawrenceville has intra-scholastic teams organized by house. The boys’ house football league is the oldest American style football league in the world, I believe. This house team system allows for complete novices to walk on to a team. However, not all of Lville’s varsity-jv level sports are offered at the house level (there are no house crew, field hockey or fencing teams, for examples).
Actually, I would pay a fair amount of attention to this aspect of BS in my selection. If you’re not that interested in sports but are required to do 2 per year, for example, you’d want to be pretty sure that there were some that were newbie-friendly and/or not so competitive. Some schools will allow you to do something that’s more instructional or developmental to fulfill that requirement (it’s often about both fitness and being part of a team), and it’s not unusual for kids who “learn” this way to find themselves on JV the next year. But for a kid who isn’t that coordinated and who feels like it’d be socially stressful to try to participate on position sport, getting forced into a grit sport (XC, crew, track) could be a different version of hell!
And if you ARE really interested in sports and hope to play for four years, you want to understand the progression, especially if the school has PG students (the vast majority of whom are athletes.) At some of the bigger schools with good athletics and a lot of PG kids, few of the kids who on the Freshman team will make it through the progression to Varsity because the talent doesn’t mature, it enrolls! Since one of the things that was important to DS when picking a school was that he would be able to participate in sports (not the case at our mega-LPS), so we asked about this for his sport.
And of course, for the kid who’s already stellar and hopes to continue in college, it helps if your school has a strong program.
I know non-athletic kids who found the sports they were required to participate in to be more competitive than was comfortable and ultimately really stressful. I’ve seen very talented athletes get the academics they needed to play at top PAC-12 schools. And everything in-between. It’s like everything – you want the match – what’s offered, level of intensity – to be right.
As for picking up new sports, some (naturally athletic) kids end up being quite successful with a new sport. Not D1 recruit good, but good enough to play at some of the D3 schools. So you never know!
All of this has been very helpful. Here are some highlights that I am taking home at the end of the day. 1) I will consider the importance of sports on campus (inclusive of whether or not they have PGs). 2) I will not assume that sports one can pick up newly in BS (like crew and wrestling) will be appropriate or desirable for an adolescent who is not a natural athlete 3) I will remember there are other activities such as outdoor exploring and theater . . . For now . .I am going to keep an open mind. Thank you for your support.