<p>Think about your region/metropolitan area. There are likely a handful of football powerhouses that have players receive Division I scholarhsips every year. One school in our area actually has more than a dozen DI football scholarships year in and year out. Far less publicized however, is that there are a large number of high schools that have one or two DI players on an infrequent basis.</p>
<p>If your goal is to earn a DI football scholarship, you will need to either be one of the top players at a powerhouse (not easy to do) or be the best player in recent school history at other schools (also not easy to do). In either case, colleges work hard to find talent wherever it might be.</p>
<p>I think I understand your metaphor, but I’d like a little clarification:</p>
<p>When you talk about needing to be one of the best players in recent history, in which aspect do you mean? Academics? Extracurricular pursuits? All of it? </p>
<p>You need to be a great student as in: right there with all the other kids from better schools. Empowered. Having goals. Making a difference. Finding opportunities, making the commitments.
It’s not so much about your position in the history and hearts of your current school, which you describe as low-achieving. It’s not about what is handed to you (or not.) It’s going to be about your drive to maximize your potential and your impact.</p>
<p>I share your dilemma. I attend a Florida school that is a mere 7 years old. I am the first one to score 700s in any section on the SAT. Valedictorian always attends UF. Best student was a Boston College attendee with a Gates Millennium Scholarship. Not to mention, Florida tends to stink because of the way teachers are treated by the educational bureaucracy in our state. The teachers that are willing to sponsor and assist in a top notch EC are few and far between (and I don’t blame them for this). But I do think pushing the boundaries of your limited environment is noted by top schools. Or at least it should be.</p>
<p>The answer is not so simple. I live near a public school district where about 20% of the grads go to the most selective schools in the country. Is it because the school is so terrific, or the fact that a large proportion of the parents of those kids are alums, some development, celebrity, and certainly wise in the way of selective school admissions that they get those numbers? It’s not as though the kids are not up there in terms of test scores, difficulty of classes, impressive national achievements, either. I don’t know if taking most of those kids out of that school would have hurt their chances of acceptance. There might be some who were accepted and being in that school was a plus factor in getting that acceptance and there might be just as many, fewer, or more who were not accepted to such schools that would have been had they been going to a less competitive school where their GPAs, their recs, their ECs, their class load difficulty would have been viewed differently. </p>
<p>I personally know of a couple of kids who left rigorous private schools and did much better gradewise after a not so great freshman year and got into school better than their peers who stayed at the private school despite the better overall record of the private getting kids into top schools over the public. So. it’s hard to say. A B at Tough top school does not equal an A at Public Not Top High. I can tell you that.</p>