My daughter did decide to play a sport in college and did decide on engineering. In both decisions, she was very (very) late to the decision so she didn’t have any time to plan hs courses to complete requirements for college, or engineering specifically.
If I had to do it over again (or with another kid), I would have had her check off the non-engineering requirements. If she could have completed the required writing, English, history etc, that would have really helped her. She was not a very good test taker in high school, so APs weren’t a good way for her to tick off the requirements. She could have gotten some DE credits in those courses and she wouldn’t have had to take them in college (the ones she took were pretty similar to hs writing and English courses).
Alas, she started college with not one DE, AP or other credit as an engineer. She started in Calc 1 and Chemistry 1, took all the courses in order, and it worked out fine. She would have had more wiggle room if she didn’t have those 15 or 20 basic courses she had to take which made for some 16-18 credit semesters.
If she’d had credit for Calc 1 or chemistry in high school, she’d still have to take Calc 2 in college and her load in the early years would have been similar - 1-2 science courses, a math class, etc. As far as sports goes, it didn’t really matter if she was in calc 1 or calc 2, but it sure would have been nice not to have to take a class she wasn’t good in, like writing.
She didn’t run into conflicts with sports and engineering until she was in higher level courses when there might have only been one section offered, and that class might have been right during practice (I think it happened once and she missed practice on those days). As a fresh and soph, there were always 2 or 3 sections to choose from, and athletes had priority registration so could get the section that didn’t conflict with practice.