I was wondering if certain sports look better on college applications than others. It may not matter at all, but I’m thinking a kid who plays varsity football who has the exact same stats, ECs, etc. as a varsity cross country runner would have a better chance of getting into X school. Is this totally wrong?
Yes.
Unless the applicant is a recruited athlete, one sport is not more important than another, nor are athletics more important than any other EC.
Partially disagree…certain sports such as football and wrestling take up a vast more amount of time away from studies that colleges recognize. Recruited athletes are as skieurope says a is invaluable for admission to top colleges. An estimated 20% of Ivy admittance is for recruited athletes.
Way too high. Closer to 11% of the matriculated class (which would equate to 6% of the accepted class, on average), although an Ivy League school with a small class like Dartmouth, the number is closer to 15% of the matriculated class.
Not sure if there is definitive proof but I think it’s quite a bit higher.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-r-cole/a-little-secret-athletics_b_787461.html
You can’t say a single figure, as it depends on the size of the class and the number of sports that the school supports. In most cases though it is a significant portion of the incoming class.
Unless you are a recruited athlete, a sport is considered to be a good EC and nothing more. If you are not a recruited athlete it won’t matter what sport you did in HS.
I do think there are activities that will impress admissions officers more than others but it is hard to know which one will do it. Even if you aren’t a recruited athlete, being a figure skating champion will look pretty good while being a member of a cross country team that has no wins or no honors is just an activity and will read that way on your applications (Track team, 9, 10, 11, 12). If you are the quarterback of the state championship team, that looks pretty good because that will be on your application (Quarterback, JV 9, 10; V. 11, 12, won state championship in 11, captain 12)
Best use of an athletic EC is to be recruited and have it push you over the top to be accepted. If you decide on D1 or D2 and get money, all the better.
It’s not. And the Huiffington Post is not the font of knowledge, IMO. 
Ivy League rules limit the number of recruited athletes to approx 205 per year per college. Most do not use the full number. The total number of freshman seats at all Ivy League universities is a bit more than 14K. Whether additional students choose to walk-on is over and above, and is not included in the recruitment numbers. Regardless, based upon the original question, Athletic recruitment is beyond the scope of this thread.
@skieurope I think you should actually read the article…not the title and dismiss it because it’s the huffington post. "In fact, James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen (the former president of Princeton and later the president of the Andrew G. Mellon Foundation) revealed these facts and many more in an important book, The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, published almost a decade ago.
They go into great detail as to how they arrive at the 20% later in the article.
Back to the OP’s question…a little depending on the sport but overall most important would be if you are a recruited athlete.
Here’s a NTY article citing the same percentage from a former Dartmouth AO
The people in the huffpost article are using data from 1989 that they published in 2003. Classes have grown and athletic spots have been cut.
Also, not all “recruiting” is created equal. It’s unclear to me from the article whether “recruit” is synonymous with “virtually guaranteed admission” because there simply aren’t enough dedicated spots for athletes at Brown to be 20% of the admits.Was I “recruited” because my coach had my name on a list of athletes he wanted? The list is at least 10x longer than the number of slots he gets and he makes it clear to applicants that he does this and that if you’re not in the top 10%, he’s not promising you anything.
@moscott I’ve said before on this site, Michele Hernandez has not set foot in an admissions office since my dad was a college applicant. As @iwannabe_Brown says, admissions has changed drastically since she was an AO. Whether the percentage was accurate in her era, I don’t know; I’m not that invested in it to research. However, it is not that high these days at Ivy League schools, although it is at some LAC’s. If you choose to not believe, then we will just have to agree to disagree.
And keep in mind that the OP has never said that he/she is a recruited athlete but was just asking about how different sports may look on an application.
At our high school varsity football is 80 boys, varsity cross country is 7.
It is much harder to make the xc squad.
@skieurope As I stated before I partially disagree. While the numbers have changed I believe 10% is too low also.
From 2016 http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2016/04/29/athletic-recruitment-policy-still-undecided/
“At Yale, student-athletes made up 13.1 percent — 177 out of 1,351 students — of the class of 2015, the last class for which recruitment statistics were disclosed by Beckett. With that number, an increase in recruited athletes of 15 percent would result in nearly 27 additional athletes annually.”
And as I stated before in post #3, schools with smaller enrollments will have a higher percentage than the Ivy average. Cornell's large class size skews the Ivy average. 13% is still far away from 20%. Anyway, since this is really does not pertain to the OP, I'll stop now.
To bring it back to OP (and I believe this was already said) if we are not talking about recruited athletes, it makes no difference what sport you do.
/thread
In order for the type of the sport to make a difference it has to be connected to something else. If the sport is connected to your other activities, or shows impact to the high school or community that will be noted more even if you are not recruited athlete. But that’s the same with any EC. The same activity/sport can be not interesting or very interesting depending on how it is presented and how it ties up with your story/profile.