doesn't make sense to me wrote:
Holding kids back for athletics never made much sense to me. I played HS football with a few kids who ended up in the NFL. Those dudes were just a different breed than the rest of us, even compared to other very good athletes.
Right, but I think it was at least partly a college thing. You don't need to be NFL-good, or even a realistic prospect, to get scholarship money. For that you need to impress people as a high school student, and a year of development could actually make a difference.
Also partly a pride thing, football parents want their kid to be good at whatever level he plays at. It makes even more sense if you assume high school football or basketball matters for its own sake. There are people out there with that point of view. This is a board full of runners, which selects for people who don't share that mentality or those values quite as strongly. If we did, maybe we'd have warmed the bench of the basketball team rather than running.