Don't let your kids waste their time on Sports

Parents Forum
81

None of this was a waste of time for either of your kids. They did things they enjoyed with passion and commitment. That is what matters.

Would your sporty son have been a happy kiddo if you had told him he was wasting his time doing sports? And really…I hope you wouldn’t have done that.

So your debate kid got some acceptances your sporty kid didn’t get. Colleges are crafting a class. For all we know, they needed someone with debating skills.

Both of my kids were very very heavy on music ECs and only one pursued that as a major. But that music EC was very important to them and I never would have told the not music major to do something different.

It never dawned on us to have our kids do certain ECs to impress college adcoms.

You need to celebrate that these two kids have things they really enjoy doing.

2 Likes
82

I don’t cheerlead (have never been a cheerleader, could never even do a cartwheel) but have family with bumper stickers that say “cheerleading is a sport” so just had to jump in. My cousin was heavily recruited for cheerleading. She was very, very competitive going to national competitions and was recruited by 2 big 10 colleges. She couldn’t get scholarships because it is not an NCAA sport but they most definitely recruit. She is an insane gymnast. I just had to jump in on her behalf!

4 Likes
83

OP, I’m glad you created this thread. Our country does overvalue youth sports. We hear all the time about how youth sports build character, teamwork and leadership but we hardly hear about the potential downsides such as opportunity costs and a sports culture that can sometimes be macho and toxic. So I’m glad you are talking about your regrets for the benefit of parents who will come after you.

But you shouldn’t get hung up on your regrets, because college is a whole new chance for our kids to learn about themselves and discover the world. My son is a sophomore in college now, and it has been an amazing and thrilling thing to watch as a parent. His world is so much bigger than it was in high school. I look back on the parenting worries that consumed my mind at this time 2 years ago, and they are all forgotten.

Wishing your entire family, especially your 2 terrific boys, all the best.

13 Likes
84

That’s not what I am reading in the comments. AOs do like to see sustained commitment AND impact. Some kids are spending 20-25 hours/week on a sport, but are not able to articulate their impact in their activity listing. If they can’t convey significant impact or something that they are doing that sets them apart from the 100s or 1000s of other very similar high school athlete applications that an AO will review, a non-recruited athlete probably won’t see much marginal benefit in the extra hours for the sport during the admissions process.

As others have pointed out, even if that does happen and applicant hasn’t distinguished themselves for admissions, that doesn’t mean the individual has “wasted their time” playing a sport. There are a multitude of short-term and long-term benefits.

I don’t think this thread is odd at all.

5 Likes
85

Life is about choices. Everybody has the same number of hours and minutes in every day, week, month. How we all choose to spend that time is where there’s a lot of options.

Should you choose an extracurricular activity just because you think it’ll help you get into college? No. That’s a good way to be miserable.

Should you do an extracurricular activity that you enjoy? Yes.

If that extracurricular ends up helping you out in the college app process, that’s icing on the cake.

Take whatever the particular children’s extracurricular activity is and out of any pack of parents, you can probably find at least one semi-crazy parent who’s super mega pushy and is convinced that THIS will be the thing to catapult their kid into Dream College.

I think the general advice of “don’t let your kids waste time on sports” is too general of a thing. I think that what’s probably the more valid advice is something like “Don’t expect a sport to guarantee you’ll get into college.”

When my kids were younger, they did year-round swimming. USA Swimming, not a local summer league. Massive time commitment. Practices 5 days a week, occasionally 6. 2 day, sometimes 2.5-3 day meets once a month. Some of those required travel with overnight stay. Swim meet fees. Swim team monthly dues. Tons of $$ spent on swim suits, goggles, swim caps, fins, the whole 9 yards. And don’t get me started on tech suits…literally hundreds of $$ for a suit that you wear only a couple of times in competition and then it rips.

Some of those swim parents were totally insane. Talking about how their 9-10 year old is going to be the next Missy Franklin and get a full ride scholarship to college.

Once you hit a certain age, then there’s practices twice a day…in the dark before the rest of the normal world wakes up and then at the end of the day after your school day is done. Spending 3-4 hours of your day swimming. And then do homework after that.

My kids dropped out of that when D24 was 12 and D26 was 10. D24 wanted to explore other interests and D26’s coach changed and the new coach told her that she was lazy and too slow (that woman was what I referred to as a long string of 4 letter words).

If my kids had stuck with swimming, would it have helped D24’s college applications? Maybe, maybe not. Who knows. It doesn’t really matter at this point. Did your son enjoy all of his years of participation in his sport? That’s more important than the temporary competition between him and his sibling in terms of who got into which school and all that.

Sometimes, the sports kids regret not having had the time to do anything else but their sport. Sometimes, they might regret not being good enough or not having the desire to play their sport in college. Sometimes that’s exacerbated by other adults or other students asking them “Oh, aren’t you playing Sport X in college?” Those people are only trying to make conversation, but they’re kind of clueless, so you just say something very generic and smile and nod.

Consider the speech & debate kids…there’s literally thousands of high schoolers in the US who are on a speech & debate team/club. Will this help them get into Harvard? No. Not unless they’re highly ranked in it at a national level. And then even just maybe it might give them an edge. It’s like reading tea leaves. Open to lots of interpretation.

Lots of colleges like to see that a student is able to commit to something longer term. That’s great. Your sporty kid definitely fits in that category.

Take my D26 by comparison. She’s floated around a few different extracurriculars, but hasn’t found one yet that she really loves. Tried robotics for 2 yr, learned that she pretty much hates the competition aspect of it and it didn’t help that the faculty advisor for the robotics club was pretty much useless and provided so advising or suggestions whatsoever. Robotics was a grind and for 3 months in a row, we were at Saturday all-day competitions and had no life other than that. Worse than monthly swim meets from ages ago.

This year, D26 switched to mock trial, has learned that mock trial, to her anyway, “feels like I’m having to take a whole extra class with homework and everything” and it “requires too much public speaking and you know how introverted I am.” Last weekend’s regional mock trial competition lasted from 7:30 am-6:00 pm. Not sure yet what other thing she will try instead next year, but I guarantee you it won’t be drama, musical theater, or performing arts. :slight_smile:

If your kid found an extracurricular that they actually enjoy, consider yourself blessed.

There’s a lot of different advice on this out there. There isn’t one single right answer, I think. So listen and consider the advice of one’s school counselor, but then go ahead and do what you feel works best for your family. :slight_smile:

6 Likes
86

I’m sorry for your sons’ situation. I think that if you expect sports to be your golden ticket, that’s your folly right there.

I only did sports in high school for fun, and it ended up being one of the most rewarding experiences of my high school career. I had no expectations of getting anything out of it compared to my other ECs. I wasn’t the best in the school, but wound up becoming varsity captain through my leadership abilities. I’m pretty sure that didn’t hurt my chances, but I put my eggs in more than one basket: varsity captain of my sports team ended up ranking 7th for the 10 (I think?) extracurriculars you get on the common app. True, I did get rejected from most schools I applied to, but I got in to a couple top CS programs I was very happy attending and had to make some hard decisions.

What’s more, being a child of immigrant parents myself, having done sports in middle and high school has allowed me to integrate more into mainstream American culture. Sports play a large role in our society, and not interacting with it makes you miss out on it, even more so if mainstream American culture isn’t what you are socialized with in your home.

3 Likes
87

Right. I let him take the lead but i have an athlete in an individual, time based sport that requires year round commitment and often misses classes during the school year. He doesn’t have time for many other ECs but is very involved with one academic EC (depth instead of breadth). No compromises were ever made in school rigor and he had to learn how to work with his teachers and manage his work particularly during travel.

Having said this, he does not think of himself as “the sport kid” and went to great lengths to write about things other than his sport. In fact, the CC absolutely forbade it. He also didn’t speak much about his other EC because his involvement was clear and the teacher was writing the LOR. He used every opportunity to showcase other things about himself. I think this is where things can go wrong for kids heavily involved in a single activity - they only talk about that.

3 Likes
88

I never thought about it like that! But it is true that travel sports are like a job.

Because we had 3 kids and both worked, DH and I had a strict no-travel-sports rule for our kiddos when they were growing up. We figured based on our DNA that no one was going to be a professional athlete. My oldest played various sports all the way along–through the school or local park district, no travel.

Around the time she turned 16 she decided she wanted to ramp up her involvement and started training for her sport outside of the season and outside of the school team. So she really upped the time training and we started traveling for competitions. And crazy enough … found out she could keep doing her sport at a D3 level. Went through recruitment and she is a D3 athlete.

She obviously is not going pro. But I think the general consensus by pros is NOT to specialize early. That’s how you wind up with repetitive motion injuries.

I should add, as a D3 athlete … that is like having a job. It’s a huge time commitment year round. As a student athlete you have to miss out on a lot of other opportunities and normal college life stuff. There are always trade offs of time and attention. So I would not encourage anyone to play a sport in college unless they really love it!

4 Likes
89

Tonight, my son’s hockey team lost in round 3 of state’s playoffs. It’s his last ice hockey game for his high school. It was an amazing game, better than the NHL, tied until the last 2 minutes, and the crowd was deafening. Some of the seniors took off their helmets on the ice and broke down crying. He told his line mates that he was proud to have played with them, and to the captain, that he wouldn’t have wanted any other captain for the team. And after all that, he came home singing Sinatra’s “My Way”.

Sports might not get your kid into college, but their value transcends the capricious college application process.

19 Likes
90

My son played club soccer and varsity soccer at school. He has amazing coordination but is not the fastest. As a result, he was put in toward the back while he wanted to score goals. There was sometime disappointment with the coach and not all emotions were positive but: he learned to cope with team dynamics, got more organized and was outside instead of playing video games, got to know kids from less privileged origins as we had scholarship players.

Now plays club soccer in college for fun. All in all, soccer turned out to be a great lifetime hobby. We always stressed that he was not going to be a professional athlete and academics came first. I did not go to many games and outsourced the driving to more committed fellow team moms. My husband did not go to any games. Soccer was one of several activities he listed on his college application.

From our experience, it seems that there is middle ground where you can find a reasonable level of commitment. Now, we never considered him playing two sports. This would have been too much.

7 Likes
92

Our son did not play any sport until he joined the novice crew team in ninth grade. By far, it was the best thing he got out of his high school years, but he rowed for love not college admissions. His elementary school years were consumed with Scouts and, from fifth grade on, digital filmmaking. He just wasn’t interested in sports in those early years, and we didn’t see any point in encouraging him to do anything he wasn’t interested in. When it came time to apply to college, he had three ECs—crew, film club, and Boy Scouts (Eagle), but that short list did not hurt any of his applications to selective schools. We never saw any of the applications, so I can’t say exactly what made him shiny to the colleges that admitted him, but he didn’t apply to any of them as an athlete or film artist. Those were just activities he enjoyed, and the ROI was the personal enrichment he got from them which certainly was not wasted time.

As others have stated in various ways above, allowing your children to follow their interests in ways that help them become the best versions of themselves is the investment that will serve them best throughout their lives. The “return” is personal growth and enrichment, not any particular college result.

4 Likes
93

I see both sides to this, as the parent of a student whose primary extracurricular passion in high school was sports.

She gained a certain toughness, resilience, and courage through sports beyond what is displayed by many of her peers who did not participate in sports. It has been awesome for her physical and mental health.

But the youth sports machine in this country is broken. Clubs push kids to play year-round, making it much harder to participate in other activities or even to play multiple sports (despite it being generally agreed to produce better and less injury-prone athletes). The “better” the club, the greater the travel/time/cost commitments, it seems. And kids who are passionate about a sport generally aren’t satisfied playing at the rec level with kids who don’t take it as seriously. So it’s kind of an all-or-nothing conundrum.

I never thought that sports would get my kid into college so they weren’t a “waste of time” in that sense. But the OP’s post resonated with me because I do think the time and effort put into a sport can be discounted in the college admissions process. Not to say admissions folks don’t recognize the time and effort put in by a non-recruited athlete — they do. But it doesn’t translate into a more tangible benefit for the school. A great drummer could contribute to the school symphony or marching band and minor in music, enriching the music department. A great debater could contribute to the school paper, radio station, and debate programs and major in journalism or political science and be an ambassador for those departments.

A great non-recruited athlete is going to…kill it on the school’s club team?

I do think that sports can be great for building character, but the benefits don’t translate into easily-identifiable and unique qualities that could enhance the student body.

And the time commitment and dedication required of many sports can make it difficult or unrealistic for many athletes to develop other interests in areas that would stand out. It’s worse in some high schools and communities than others.

It makes me sad, not so much from the college admissions perspective, but more from the personal development perspective. There really is no need to play year-round anything, except that’s how clubs and coaches get paid. If there truly were an off-season, how much richer and fuller could some young athletes’ lives become? What other passions would blossom?

One good thing that came out of the pandemic was that the lockdowns allowed my child to explore and pursue some interests that she would not have had time for during a typical sports year. It was refreshing for herSo I guess I would say that sports were not a TOTAL waste of time in her case, but SOME of the time spent was a waste. And a waste not easily avoided without giving up a beloved sport altogether.

12 Likes
94

One of my kids was a 3 sport varsity athlete. My other played a fall sport and also had a lot of other things going on.

They were happy, had a close knit group of friends, learned how to win/lose, etc. Some of the best times I had when my kids were in HS (there were many) were when we sat in the bleachers and watched my kids and their friends play, traveled to competitions etc. I loved the games, loved going out after, loved the laughs, etc. Some of those kids did travel. One was recruited to a local private school and the rest stopped playing after HS.

I never thought about how sports would impact college acceptances. We all had a great experience and I was happy to be a part of it. The intensity was definitely there, but we stayed away.

6 Likes
95

I’m not sure what you’re lamenting about. Both your sons got into great schools. I’m assuming Sports Son can apply to the business program at some point at UT (I’m sure it’s competitive but that’s to be expected at UT). I’m also guessing there are business-adjacent degree options at UT for those who don’t get into the business school.

If Sports Son enjoyed playing his sport, then let it go. Looking in the rearview mirror doesn’t do anyone any good. UT & SMU are great options!

My daughter was a 4-year varsity athlete, worked and maintained a high GPA. I never thought playing a sport itself would stand out to colleges (she had no desire to be recruited) but rather being able to juggle all those things while maintaining a rigorous class schedule. Almost anyone could lock themselves in their room with their textbooks and bang out a high GPA, but being able to do it while managing multiple responsibilities tells AO’s that they are ready for college rigor.

I feel like a broken record, but college is ONLY 4 years of their lives, not a life-sentence.

You can Google all the mental health benefits of being active and playing a sport.

6 Likes
96

You can also Google the injuries, concussions, and mental health stress that youth sports can cause. It is a mixed bag.
UT business school is a direct admission for a 4 year program; transfer in is rare and difficult.
Entire continents have children “ready for college rigor” without participating in our style of youth sports. More ready than the children here, actually.

2 Likes
97

Your mileage may vary, I guess :woman_shrugging:

If the kid enjoys the sport and it doesn’t interfere with their school work, then let them play.

If you want to argue about the pros & cons of youth sports, a separate thread may be more appropriate.

9 Likes
98

Non-business majors at UT can do a business minor as well as register for certain business courses during defined enrollment periods.

Approved Courses for Non-Business | McCombs School of Business (utexas.edu)

There’s an Econ degree program under the College of Liberal Arts and Advertising and PR degree programs under the College of Communication.

4 Likes
100

I’m not sure why you think this is less of a contribution to college life than any other student club or activity. Club and IM sports are major activities at many colleges, and like all such activities they help attract students who would be interested in doing such things themselves. To me that is indeed no different from, say, debate.

10 Likes
101

I’ll just say again to try - hard - to stop beating yourself up. There’s no crystal ball, and no way to know in hindsight what impact that one single decision made. It sounds like your sons had some differences in strengths/talent/personalities that you honored by letting them take paths that enabled them to develop those skills and strengths. There’s a lot of value in that. They got to forge their own paths and felt supported in doing so. There’s no way to know if Sports Son would have had a nicer friend group and a closer relationship with Debate Son had you made different decisions. And, choosing a different path might have ended up with you having different regrets now. The fact that Sports Son has faced some adversity is not necessarily a bad thing - something else I constantly tell myself when I see my kids struggling. That will hopefully help him when he faces different sorts of adversity in college and beyond. And, as you’ve also stated - both of your kids have great opportunities ahead of them and the tools to use those opportunities to the fullest.

8 Likes