I don’t see being valedictorian as being super important to college admissions. After all, you don’t actually know if you will be valedictorian until after the application season is over, and pretty much after you’ve been accepted/rejected from your schools. Just a personal story, the valedictorian at our school was denied from the UWash Honors Program whereas I, not the valedictorian, was accepted. I wasn’t far from her, but the point of the story is that being valedictorian doesn’t really matter.