I know that the answer is ‘scholarships’ for college, but like, why? I’m in the UK and even schools that have a big reputation for sport are nowhere near as intense as the states. Reading parenting subs atm talking about signing up 5 year olds for specific sports so that they’ll have a shot of making the team in high school. That just feels insane to me.
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Size, population density, and culture. If you’re in the UK, you’re never too far (relatively) to a decent professional football squad. In the midwestern U.S., you could be 500 miles from your nearest top-level professional team. There’s just not enough money and population for even lower-level professional teams to make sense. So all the tribal sports solidarity has to find another outlet, and that’s high school or college sports.
That’s for the fandom part. For the competition to make teams part, that’s just in prestigious, selective schools with students trying to get into prestigious, selective schools, and having sufficiently wealthy parents to go all out.
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