<p>AG54, it’s a funny and somewhat pathetic story about what people assume.
All the athletes I know personally were good students in HS. One got a full scholarship to play water polo and is now a mechanical engineer. Another one who was ranked, graduated from S and is now a banker.</p>
<p>At our high school, it seems that the more individual sports teams such as tennis, swimming, and gymnastics have the highest academic profiles.</p>
<p>It’s very common for a student to be judged by his/her activities, because that is how people recognize who they are. D is a dancer (school team & studio), most people assume she is going to school as a dance major (not true). That’s just how they identify her.</p>
<p>That said, the whole awards thing is a sore point for me anyway. D is in the top 5 in her class (400 students), honors whenever available, lots of AP’s and NO awards to date. Even in classes where she far exceeded anyone else’s grade. She knows all of her teachers well and they all like her, but she comes up empty handed every year. Senior awards are coming up and my inclination is to let her sleep in that day and call her in as sick, she has no hope of getting recognized.</p>
<p>At geek_son’s school, there are many scholar-athletes who are on the honor roll every trimester, have a part in the school play, are in academic decathlon, and are on varsity teams in three sports… per season. There are also some students whose only real strength is sports, but those usually aren’t the ones who are leading the team and getting substantial field/court time.</p>
<p>Probably wouldn’t work that way in a larger school; this school is small enough that students can walk onto a team and the coaches and directors will coordinate practice and rehearsal schedules. But still. These kids work their tails off and earn a lot more respect than some on CC would give.</p>
<p>My high school valedictorian was also a state champion wrestler. I think that often the drive to excel carries over from the playing field to the classroom, and vice-versa.</p>
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<p>Same at my S’s HS. The water polo/swim team usually “dukes it out” annually with the tennis team as to which has the higher percentage of kids who get academic student athlete awards (granted, the bar isn’t so high at a 3.0 GPA.) S has noted the tennis team has been winning of late, commenting that there are more Asians on the tennis team than there are in the pool. </p>
<p>It’s not uncommon that the Val/Sals come from the pool. Right now, the top three in the junior class are on varsity lacrosse, cross country/track and water polo/swim.</p>
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At our large suburban high school, there was a boy on the football team, first in the state in wrestling, lead in the school play who received an academic scholarship to college. I think the drive to succeed carries over to more than one area of a person’s life.</p>
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[QUOTE=3bm103]
I think the drive to succeed carries over to more than one area of a person’s life.
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Granted, and your example is compelling. Now imagine the scheduling hassles he would have had if he’d tripled his sports commitments. :eek: That works if the coaches will cooperate.</p>
<p>At my large suburban high school, a football player was the lead in the musical – but he could do that because football was a fall sport and the musical was a spring event. The coach wouldn’t have let him do both at the same time. That was the only point I was making about small vs large schools – nothing about the students.</p>
<p>Both of my Ds are three sport athletes and top students. They have been fortunate to be All-State, All-Metro and All-Conference in their sports and Academics. I don’t think anyone who knew them was surprised by their ability to set and reach academic goals. I strongly believe that athletic involvement teaches valuable life skills…time mangement, goal setting, leadership, reaching group consensus, etc.</p>
<p>If one assumed that athletic ability and intellectual ability were not correlated at all, you would expect to see some kids who are great athletes and great students, some who are good at one and not the other, many who are mediocre at both, and some who are bad at both. Ability and performance are different. Performance in either area involves the investment of time and energy, which involves both choice, and as someone pointed out, drive. Since time and energy are somewhat limited, kids who choose to invest heavily in one have less time to invest heavily in the other. So, kids who choose to invest heavily in becoming good athletes will on average take something away from their performance as students and vice versa. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be some kids who are great athletic and academic performers, but there will probably be fewer of them than one might expect if the performance were independent. Kids who don’t have drive will invest in neither.</p>
<p>This is actually consistent with my experience in high school, college and otherwise. The few great athletes tended not to be great students (Bill Bradley and a few others notwithstanding). The really brilliant kids that I knew and really brilliant adults that I know were not great athletes. To take a few extremes, I went to high school with a guy who was the best football prospect in the country (Woody Hayes, Bo Shembechler, et al. visited the HS) but he signed with a major league baseball team and had an All Star career. Not the world’s best or most motivated student. Similarly, I’m friends with one of the country’s leading scientists who won almost every major award in HS and college and thereafter (no Nobel yet). An OK athlete, but nothing to write home about, but in HS he did math team really well. There are a couple of people I can think of who were both. Bill Bradley, Victor Niederhoffer, and I’m sure there are others. But, I would be surprised if really strong athletes are not underrepresented among those with really strong academic performance and vice versa. </p>
<p>Do you think strong athletes are overrepresented at the high end of academic performance in high school? It seems like the last three posters do. I’d be surprised, but I would expect to have a reasonable representation of strong athletes among the strong academic performers in high school.</p>
<p>I don’t think I’d expect the same level of representation of strong athletes among strong academic performers in college. I think the correlation was clearly negative at my alma mater and the strong performer at both was the exception rather than the rule, as lafalum and 3bm103 would appear to think. It is possible that the hurdle to be a strong performer is that much higher in both domains that one can’t invest sufficiently in both. My son interviewed with an alumnus from my alma mater, who was the star hockey player in his years (both at my son’s HS and my alma mater). He said that while he did reasonably well academically, college hockey was like a 30-40 hour per week job, which took away from what he could do academically.</p>
<p>I do think that participating seriously in extracurricular activities including but not limited to sports teaches one time management skills that will be helpful in later life. I don’t think that sports is necessarily better than other activities in that way. Where some sports may have something unusual to offer in terms of life skills is teaching the ability to work with others constructively.</p>
<p>^ shawbridge, this is an interesting line of thought. I think that sports participation teaches work ethic, time management, and patience. Physical activity is the antithesis of cramming imho, as the body responds on its own timetable (absent chemical enhancement). I think that *team sports<a href=“as%20opposed%20to%20solitary%20sports%20such%20as%20tennis”>/I</a> also teach interpersonal skills and a sense of being part of something greater than oneself. All of these are excellent life skills. Are they unique to sports – personally, I don’t think so. I see them in choir, band, and theatre as well. I’m sure there are other ECs that impart some or all of the same life skills.</p>
<p>There is only so much time in a day, no matter how much one stretches oneself. My son had to make a choice between sports he liked at school and an activity he loved in the community – tried to do both one year, and found that he simply couldn’t be in two places at once and some schedules are non-negotiable. Well, for a teenager, even that is a useful revelation and an experience to draw on.</p>
<p>I think there is also a “saturation point,” which probably varies from person to person, beyond which something has to give. And some kids learn the concept of “satisficing” quickly as a result (hmmm, if I hand in that paper a day late I’ll lose 10%, but that will drop my overall grade to a 93 which is still an A… hmmm, I could get an A in this class even with a 78 on a final, so I’ll study more for that other class instead). That’s probably a useful life skill too.</p>
<p>But. Interestingly enough, with only a few exceptions, my son’s grades have often been highest during the times when he’s been busiest. Maybe that’s just because he swears off computer games during those times. :D</p>
<p>Hmmm. Good posts on all sides and without rancor. Imagine that? </p>
<p>A couple of anecdotes. </p>
<p>In my D’s high school basketball district we send 3 teams to the play-offs. Starters on each of the 3 teams her senior year were the sole valedictorians of their school. (I still think that’s interesting and it’s been 3 years.) </p>
<p>My D’s senior year there were @ 50 girls who made academic all-state basketball in her school’s classification- about 200 schools, give or take. All it took was a 90% and all-district honors (and according to her coach weighted GPA was O.K.). That seemed like kind of a low bar to crawl over to me. </p>
<p>So, drawing from my endless research into this topic (if endless can be defined as 5 minutes ;)) I have determined the following: </p>
<p>1) While scholar athletes do exist in large numbers there may not be quite as many as we think there are.
AND
2) They are all represented here on CC by good-looking parents. ;)</p>
<p>Athleticism is just one of various “desireable” traits. The people who like to “slam” athletes on these forums just sound naive when they post. While not all humans are good athletes, athletics are in general a good thing to do for mind and body health. The general state of many people in this county and their children (obese and unfit) should clearly illustrate to all of us that we are woefully neglecting the physical health of our children. I think it’s great that most colleges have intramural sports where all kids can participate regardless of ability. It’s unfortunate that this is often not the case in our public schools. It’s also unfortunate that physical education has become a stepchild class that often involves very little physical-ness and kids can opt-out/be excused for a myriad of reasons. I personally despised phys ed in high school…we wore these stupid bloomer outfits and there are just some sports like gymnastics that completed eluded my capabilities. I will never, ever forget trying to jump the Pommell horse (sp?) in 9th grade and being so embarassed that I couldn’t do it, but there are a couple sports that I participated in then and continue even today. My husband and my kids all have a sport or two or three that they routinely do. And yes, my kids are bright and “manage” somehow to take Latin as a zero hour class. Yes, there are people that are “Athletes” with a capital A and dumber than rocks and there are people that are insecure about themselves physically and avoid any semblance of athletic endeavor and possibly some that are disabled to such a degree that they simply can’t exhert themselves but bottom line is that we as a nation are not in general “fit” and that is quite sad. I won’t even go into the benefits of learning team building, the social skills, learning to win and learning to fail…others have spoken eloquently on those aspects of athletics.</p>
<p>geek-mom, I do think that learning how to make trade-offs is an important life skill, as is time management. Sports may also reinforce work ethic, if it is easier to see the link between effort and results than in other settings. I think team sports do a great job of teaching people a certain kind of interpersonal skills that involve working jointly towards a goal. Theater and choir may do that as well, no experience there.</p>
<p>I think American society and high schools place greater value on sports than on many other activities. Not sure why. I love sports and played varsity sports in HS and college, though I would not claim to have been a good athlete. [I would claim to have been a good student]. But, I think we give it greater weight than other activities (e.g., time spent in social action, modern dance, running the school radio station, writing for the student newspaper or literary magazine, etc.) and I don’t see the activities as meaningfully more beneficial socially or in any other way (though getting exercise is a good thing in and of itself). My impression is that colleges also give greater weight to being an athlete than to many other equally time-consuming activities.</p>
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<p>LOL! </p>
<p>The three top junior student athletes at our HS that I mentioned before are more students than athletes. They may play club in college but none of them are first string HS by any means. They try their best but know what’s going to butter their bread in the future. :)</p>
<p>I have heard repeatedly that in general, kids who play sports do better in school. The very top student who spends most of their waking hours with their nose in a book will outperform a student who spends 3 hours per day on a playing field, but except for those extremes, most kids I know find that playing a sport actually improves their academics. With my own D, her highest grades come during her varsity season. I’ve heard that from many other parents as well. The extra time demands of their sport force them to manage their time, plan ahead and schedule their work, and limit the “goofing around.” </p>
<p>Many studies show that kids who are involved in after school activities, be it sports or drama or clubs or music, do better in school.</p>
<p>The very top athletes, who spend 4 or 5 hours per day year round on their sport, will clearly not be top students. But for most kids, playing a sport enforces a discipline that is helpful to their academics. And I think the physical release of athletics helps to clear their minds after school as well, and helps them to focus when they sit down to do their homework.</p>
<p>Thinking of my daughter’s class, the top students: are in band, run track, wrestle, play basketball or play baseball. In my son’s class the top graduates: played tennis, ran track or were in band.</p>
<p>Just for grins I printed out the girls basketball “academic all-state” list in Texas for our HS classification for 09 (58 this year) and compared it to the “all-state” list. I found 3 girls , and personally know of another who should have been there. So that’s 4 (there could be others). Ramp that up from a 90 GPA to something you’d likely see on CC and it might get down to…? Drop the all-district athletic requirement down to Honorable Mention and the numbers would certainly go up considerably.</p>
<p>Just to note, my data point did not make all-state (deficient gene-pool). I stated at college app time we were hoping her grades would be her hook for a college team, not the other way around.;)</p>
<p>Our son excelled in the most rigorous courses available and was a varsity athlete and on-field leader. In our athletic-centered school, this served him well, as it inoculated him against the social isolation that his nerdiness would otherwise have imposed. Unfortunate, but true.</p>
<p>He learned team work and cooperation on the field and in the orchestra. But sports gave him “creds.” Plus, he really liked it.</p>
<p>One other thing about Student Athletes that people on CC often forget, is that often times the very best athletes are also the top students. This in my observation is because these kids are the “competive” kids who want to be their best both on the field, and in the classroom. It does carry over to other parts of their lives, as many have mentioned.</p>
<p>And of couse, they have the best looking parents 
too.</p>
<p>No doubt about the latter part of post 39 :)</p>