My son did a lot of theater in high school – both acting and directing. He was Treasurer of the school’s Drama Club, its largest club, as an 11th grader, and President his senior year. He was also a tapdancer, and was involved in dance performance. As President of the club, he arranged for it to staff a haunted house (actually, ghost ship) project for Halloween that raised money for homeless kids, and he also arranged a deal to provide crew and actors for student filmmakers at Temple. Drama was something he did purely for himself, and because a bunch of his friends were also in the Drama Club. It was probably his most significant EC, but he was also captain of the school’s Academic Olympics team for two years, a volunteer in a paleontology lab, and one of three student members of a district-wide committee to re-examine 12th grade curriculum. And he worked for pay in a store.
He was rejected or waitlisted by all of the “top 20 in selectivity” colleges to which he applied, despite above-average academic stats.
Nothing works all the time.
(In college, he continued with drama, but mostly moved into tech work and set design except for a few dance performances. The university theater created a new prize to give him, to resolve a dispute among its faculty and staff over whether they should give what had theretofore been the only theater prize to a tech person. After college, he has moonlighted on and off working in management for a small professional theater 25 hours/week.)