You have described my D22 to a tee. Our older kids were good students, but not tippy top scholars, who went to the local flagship and did absolutely great. One has an advanced degree and established career. One is headed into grad studies and landed the first “real” job.
Your post could have been written about my high school senior. But I didn’t catch on that she could be “elite” college material until her PSAT score came in. Too late to really “nudge” her toward any ECs, if we were so inclined.
Her sport takes a ton of time, but the pandemic cancellations allowed her to really invest a lot more hours in community service and an outdoor internship. These were activities she ended up writing a lot about on college applications, so I am glad she was well-rounded in that sense.
But she wasn’t particularly “spiky” in one academic or artistic or intellectual or activist area. The term I have seen around here to describe kids like her is “average excellent.” And the very existence of your daughter suggests that MY daughter is not entirely unique even though she appears that way at her individual high school. 
So — what have we learned through this college application process? It has been interesting. My D22 is considering an offer to play D3 at an excellent LAC (top 40, but not top 10), where she negotiated to apply RD because it is at the top of our financial comfort level even with their highest merit scholarship. She also has offers at large public universities where she received great merit scholarships, admission to Honors Colleges, and an accelerated degree program. We did not apply ED anywhere and results from the three most highly selective schools where she applied are not in yet. So ask me in a few months how much the ECs mattered, lol!
What I do know is that she may be LESS likely to attend one of those schools if accepted than she was at the start of this journey. Just because she is CAPABLE doesn’t necessarily mean she SHOULD. A D1 level athlete might choose to play D3 or not at all in order to be able to focus on the academics or college experience rather than the “job” of a D1 athlete. Similarly, a gifted student may want to avoid a campus filled with club presidents and teen entrepreneurs if that increases the student’s own anxiety and is perceived to require a level of effort that infringes too much on time the student would rather spend studying yoga, playing spike ball, attending football games, or joining a sorority for fun.
My kid worked really hard in high school and also lost a lot of experiences during the pandemic. It is important to her to make the most of college and not spend ALL of it grinding away to get another A to get into grad school. She wants to enjoy her classes and learn, not white-knuckle herself through every exam praying to end on the right end of the curve. Study-life balance is really important to her, also. That means not TOO much time devoted to any one area — academic or otherwise. She has lots of interests and wants room for all of them.
That means schools with weed-out classes where it is difficult to get into her desired major may not be for her. Honestly, we are STILL sorting it out after all the applications are in. Now that we are down to the final list, campus visits and deep dives into school websites and social media have been eye-opening.
I understand the impulse to do what you can to at least give your child the opportunity to consider an Ivy or similar school when your child is highly capable. And certainly making sure they don’t bypass low-hanging fruit when it comes to leadership and community service opportunities, etc., makes sense. But I see now that there would be no point in trying to tweak my kid’s activities to make her look more like the kids who go to Yale if, fundamentally, she ISN’T like the kids who go to Yale (notwithstanding that she could do just as well in classes there).
At the moment, there is a decent chance my kid will go to a state flagship just like her siblings. Rather than leveraging her academic promise to get into a highly ranked school, she may use it to take advantage of Honors College opportunities and other opportunities afforded through the savings she achieved with merit scholarships. Or maybe she’ll be accepted at a highly selective school and fall in love when we visit.
Wherever she chooses, the school will be a good fit. And no amount of monkeying we might have done with ECs would make a school a better fit, even if we did increase chances of admission. I used to think about it backwards — like I wanted the schools to recognize that she was “Top 10 material” or something. I thought those schools should WANT kids like mine; she just needed to do the things that would get them to pay attention. Now I think if a school isn’t paying attention based on my kid’s natural inclinations/profile, she is not likely to find her people there, so no huge loss. (Not to say that there isn’t an element of lottery in college admissions at schools that take only 5 out of 100, but that’s beyond any applicant’s control.)
She has watched another kid at the top of her class gunning hard for a “dream” school with a reputation of being very intense and competitive academically and wondered why when this kid suffers panic attacks over high school classes. Likewise, she sees teammates attending NAIA schools in undesirable locations with subpar facilities and academic programs just to say they received an athletic scholarship. It is easy to get caught up in the chase and want to be able to tell people you attend a school with a huge academic reputation or that you are a collegiate athlete — but that fleeting pride better be backed up with an institution your child is really happy to attend day in and day out or it isn’t worth it, in my opinion.
Best wishes to your daughter! She sounds awesome and I am sure she will be a star wherever she lands.
