[legion]

The "game" thread got me thinking.

I went to a large Chicago suburban high school. IIRC, there were about 4,400 students enrolled when I graduated. The high school itself encompassed many well-to-do subdivisions (there were some subdivisions where every house was over $1 million in 1992). At that school, you pretty much had to pick the one thing you were going to concentrate on because the competition was so fierce. Most of the varsity football team did private athletic training (and would go on to a full ride at a division one school in college). Most of the band members took private lessons. Most of the drama club had private acting coaches. If you were going to be good enough to make any activity, you had better go out and get private instruction and practice year-round. There were fewer than five students in the school that played more than one varsity sport. The clubs were dominated by AP students trying to bolster their college resumes. These students essentially formed cliques dominating these clubs and pushed all other students out. (Well, you could join, but you were probably going to be excluded from any planning and assigned the crap work.)

This left a large swath of the school unwilling to commit to a single thing or unable to pay for the private instruction to make the cut. I was in this group. Neither I, nor any of my friends participated in any clubs or sports.

I have friends who went to much smaller high schools in small towns. Their experience was the opposite of mine. Most played a sport every season (three a school year) and participated in multiple clubs. Very few were going to go on to play their sport in college, and college resume-padding wasn't a concern as elite private schools pretty much outright refuse all rural students. The only downside I can detect is that where I was able to get through high school pretty much anonymously, these kids were all known to their peers, teachers, parents, and other townsfolk. Mistakes could follow you for the rest of you life in a small town, and probably the lives of your children and grandchildren as well.

When I lived in Gwinnett County, it seemed like they had managed to strike a balance. The county was the school district. From what I could tell, there were something like 30 high schools in the county and they all had roughly 1500 kids. Small enough that everyone could participate, big enough to have a variety of activities for students.