The problem my son had is that his grades were significantly slipping due to abuse from his coaches, so we did choose for him not to play HS soccer senior year. And yes, we think it did negatively impact his recruiting. Not like even one of his former teammates will pursue soccer in college, one had his mom email the local MLS team and ask if he could join…
So I suppose part of the point is that if she can take it, she is better off playing. Since it is a winter sport, it should have less impact on her schoolwork than a fall sport would.
Good point about the school work, rhandco. It’s something that we’ve pondered. Some days I feel like she’s is wasting so much time on the nonsense of her team that it is eating into her studying. Her grades are not heavily impacted, though, but if they were, that would be a whole other issue. The winter break does help a lot.
I’m sorry to hear you son had to sit out senior year b/c of the coaches and that it impacted his recruiting. These situations just make my blood boil. As a parent one wants to go out and protect one’s kid from the injustices that are occurring due to the team situation, but one can’t. But I guess that’s the reality of adulthood, which they will be in soon.
Very interesting thread. Couple of thoughts. First, agree with the character building. They’ll face difficult challenges throughout life and so learning to deal with conflict and even unfair circumstances effectively is important. Secondly, the early thread was talking about playing for D3 schools. In my experience, the D3 schools are an excellent opportunity to feed both desires - play college athletics and get a great education and the opportunity to be on the team and even play is better than at some of the higher levels - particularly at some of the smaller schools. Final point I also saw early in the posts was around hiring college athletes. In my “full time” work, I have actually had a preference toward college athletes at any level because they know about hard work, teamwork, commitment, overcoming obstacles and taking ownership of their performance. These are incredibly good traits to have when they hit the “real” world.