Hi rayrick, I am still lurking. I have Trinity U on the list. It looks like a great school and the COA is incredible if you get some of the merit aid that they offer. I wish it were closer to us, but I think I’ll still encourage her to take a look when she gets to that point. Trinity College is also on our list. Probably not a possibility because of cost, but things could change.
Thanks for the encouragement newJersey17. I hope we manage to stay on the type of schedule you kept to.
True about burnout, intparent, hence my username.
I apologize to everyone who took the time to respond on the second page of this thread. I totally abandoned it. I got busy at work, and with everyone telling me I was too early, I just went silent and started doing research on my own.
I do want to update everyone, though, and also for the benefit of people who read this thread in the future, I wanted to explain why I was taking the approach I was taking.
A high stats kid with almost no interest in any ECs is a very specific, and I think kind of rare, situation. If you take the normal approach of letting the kid do his or her thing, and just create a list of schools in junior year, you could end up with a very short list, that might not contain a single school that’s even close to a good fit. I know that now, and I suspected that back when I started this thread, and that’s why I started it.
I was worried that if I left it up to my daughter to pick up ECs on her own, she might inadvertently remove herself from consideration at many schools that would otherwise be a great fit. After doing a lot of research, I think this is undoubtedly true. I think I didn’t stress in my first post how uninterested my daughter seemed in pursuing ECs beyond her one sport.
I wanted to know if there were stats driven schools that could be potential fits for her, even with very weak ECs. If there were, I was going to leave her be. I personally think that the focus on ECs has reached the point of insanity. No offense to any highly accomplished kids on here who may be reading this, but I think the kids who post a page worth of ECs sound like pretty weird kids. I’m not saying bad, just weird. I don’t think I’d want to hire one of those kids. And for the kids who are doing it just to get into an elite school, I think they’re robbing themselves of their adolescence.
Of course, there’s a happy medium. I would like to see her do more, but I also think it’s very normal for her to want to have some down time. I need it. I think most adults need it. I don’t see most busy adults filling every spare moment they have with ECs 
They lay on the couch and watch football all weekend And then they’re ready to do some more hard work on Monday morning.
My daughter hangs out with her friends all weekend, except when she has track meets. Sometimes I go into her room on a Saturday morning, expecting to find her studying for her test on Monday, and instead there’s one or two other girls in her bed with her. She usually has her head laying on top of one of the other girls, and is taking a picture or listening to music, being all silly. I, of course, get worried that she’s not studying, or working at a soup kitchen that day, but that’s normal 15 year old behavior, and I wouldn’t want to steal that from her. At least not all of it, no matter what school she could get into if I did.
On the other hand, I do want her to grow as a person, and that’s what I’ve tried to keep in mind while trying to advise her about ECs. How is it going? Not great
We’re now almost halfway through sophomore year, and she still hasn’t added anything substantial. She does have a few ideas though, which is good. She added a few small things on her own, but also quit one thing that I thought was great. She added it back in after our last conversation about ECs. Anyway, I’ll keep trying.
I appreciate everyone’s advice, even the people who said I was doing it backwards I agree that for most people that would be true, but this situation is kind of unusual. I had to try to do both things at the same time - advise about course selection and ECs while searching for schools that she could still get into if I didn’t get through to her. I wanted to be able to go to her and present that short list of schools she’d be eligible for without ECs. I didn’t do it that harshly, but I did gently explain to her that she might be closing doors.
The good news is that I’m totally ready for junior year when the college search starts for real. I think it’s a real advantage to start on this part early. I can’t believe how little I knew about colleges before I started all of this. When other parents are scrambling in two years to find schools that might be a fit, I’ll be way ahead of the game. I think the biggest advantage is in the informal gathering of knowledge that you do when you’re just living your life around town, seeing people you know at parties and at sports events. In the past, when the topic turned to older siblings who were applying to, or currently in college, I used to tune out.
You can get a lot of information about fit from conversations like that, and it’s not like you’re going to run around to everyone’s houses in junior year and start interviewing them. Those opportunities come up sporadically over the years, and if you have some background information about what colleges interest you, you know when to tune in
Sorry for the long post. Just wanted to get it all down in case anyone else is going through this.
I’ll update here if there’s any good news on the EC front. Otherwise, I’ll probably go silent, and post all of the SUNY schools my daughter’s applying to in two years Not that there’s anything wrong with that