First of all, regrading your choice. Activities such as competitive figure skating and extremely time consuming and leave little time for many other extracurricular activities. My daughter, who is a dancer, had to drop orchestra in middle school, even though she was pretty talented, because she didn’t have time for both that and her dancing.
High school is also about academics, and having one more EC, so that you have one more EC, is not a reason to reduce how much you are challenging yourself academically.
Forget about “spikes” and other such nonsense. You love ice skating, and, to continue to develop as a skater, you need to spend more time doing it. You should not sacrifice your academics for this, so the EC which you like the least should go.
Now, a second thing:
NEVER do anything in high school with the sole purpose being “I’m doing this to better my admissions chances to a T-20”.
To begin with, it is a bad idea to sacrifice your high school years for your college years. I cannot tell you how many of my daughters friends, my nephews/nieces/my friend’s kids, etc have said “I feel that I wasted so much of my high school on trying to do stuff which was Good For College”. These years are as important as your college years, and what you do now is as important as what you will do in college. You will not be taking your high school transcript with you anywhere, nor will you be taking your high school awards. However, the skills you learn now, both academic and social, your non-award accomplishments, etc, will be with you for the rest of your life.
Second of all, there are very high chances that you will not be accepted to a T-20, even if your profile has everything that you think that they want. T-20 colleges are rejecting 4 times as many students like you as they accept. There are 2 million freshmen attending four-year colleges every year, and the so-called “T-20” have, between them, maybe 50,000 students, and they like to accept a good selection of students from the top 10%. Of course, only about 25,000 are being accepted from the top 10%, with the rest being accepted for reasons other than academic excellence. So, only about 1/4-1/8 of the top 10%, academically, of each graduating year are being accepted to a T-20 college.
So spending your entire four years of high school working towards a goal which you have less than a 20% chance or reaching, even if you work as hard as you can, and do everything extremely well, is a bad idea.
I won’t even go into the entire issue of affordability. Being accepted to a T-20 is only half of the battle. Unless your parents are super wealthy, or have been saving for you since you were born, there is a very good chances that your family will not be able to afford a T-20, whether you are accepted or not.
Make your choices based on the assumption that none of your accomplishments will help you get into a T-20. Your accomplishments are for you, and for your sense of pride in yourself.
The good news is: if you work hard at your academics, and do well in school, you will be accepted, and be able to attend, one of the hundreds of colleges and universities in the USA which all provide world-class educations. Moreover, if you do well academically, many of them will be extremely cheap, and, in some cases, will not only provide a full ride, but also give you some money to buy books and travel for academic purposes.
. I will think about whether I want to continue with band through the perspective of finding balance in my schedule