What sports can a sedentary kid with no athletic background play in high school?

Cross Country

golf and bowling team if these teams don’t have cuts.

If these teams do have cuts, intramural golf and intramural bowling

Yes. Cross country and track if they are ok with having moments of not being sedentary. No cuts

Discus Throw is good for sedentary people

You don't need a background in anything at high school age, you start that background in high school. If big enough to play football give it a shot, if not try track, find something there that you can do, hell....look at all the different events there,

How about body building your frosh/soph years, then see where you're at as a junior.

Chess. Oh wait that's not a sport.

My soph year of high school we got an exchange student from Nigeria his name was Robert Bombesi. He had...I can run....written all over him, so our track coach asks him to join the team, he was a senior. He had never ran track before.

First meet he loses to Roy Allen the top 400 cat in our league. But it was close, yep, by the end of the season Robert is beating everyone and beats Allen in the league meet, was running 49's.

He had no experience he had no background and was older than you are

in high school we had people with no experience on the swim team. they got to practice. they got to swim in meets.

very few could rise high through the ranks in the time it takes to graduate. basically you need to start in elementary school.

but if they are massively focused. at least for 2 seasons. it is possible they could be kind of ok in 3 years. but they could have fun all along. they were allowed to work out. they need to race for their own goals. you cant really just jump in in 2 seasons. but can change a lot in 4 seasons.

off season send the kid to circuit weights and step aerobics for a year or two and maybe play some dodgeball.

Bowling is the first that came to mind.

Curling (if your school offers that)

Small Town? In big cities the club parents are hacking it out to get their kids in sport and they use all their connections too....kids with a decade in the sport don't make soccer, that's about the worst. Baseball and softball are similar. A kid better be really big and strong to walk on a HS football team with no previous proven talent in a big city. An athletic kid who can swim can play water polo without having done it before. The poster who said cross county got it right. Good kids though on cross county.

Bowling

Back when I was in HS... we had a kid who's parents put him on the Cross Country team because they wanted him to lose weight. Our coach sort of made him the team mascot. His nickname was "Locomotive" and on long days he would always send back like another JV type guy to run with him...which nobody minded because "Locomotive" was a great guy and was really funny. On speed days, coach just let "Locomotive" jog around the outside of the track and cheer us on. Then on the last rep of the day, he got to join in and we got to cheer him on as he finished his quarter or half. And on race days, since Locomotive never made a squad... coach would have him jog out to the furthest out part of the course so we would have someone who could cheer us on and give us info on place, time and such.

Locomotive could play the guitar and he wrote a cute song called "Don't feed the Animals" and some of the cross country team sang back up at the school talent show and it was the hit of the show as everybody in the audience was singing along.

In the end... Randy "Locomotive" Holz lost about 25 lbs... got to where he could run three miles in the low 20's... became a good friend of about 25 other guys that really didn't know him... and in retrospect... that story is one of my fondest high school memories.

activities here that dont have try outs: Golf, XC, Track, swim team, Trap shooting, Bowling, Curling.

Instead of looking at is as "what sports can a sedentary kid play" look at it as doing something so that are no longer sedentary. Set a goal and work toward it.

Why do you ask and who are you asking for? Without context, its hard to provide real answers and you might as well ask grok:

xc, swimming, t&f, golf, bowling, archery,

bowling

archery

I'm amazed with all the golf answers, at my kids' high school golf is one of the harder teams to make because of the difficulty of getting tee times. I believe they had 70 boys try out for 12-15 spots.

Here anyone can join swim and some kids actually do go from a rec swimmer to pretty good by senior year, but more often than not the longtime swimmers rule that sport and only naturally athletic kids end up progressing to varsity. Non-athletic kids probably the best participation sports are track and cross country. Honestly at our high school too I don't think football cuts anyone, they may not get a lot of playing time, but our school isn't huge so they just need numbers. Obviously in big football schools that wouldn't be the case.

Both of those sports don't require a huge amount of athleticism but to be good at them requires a lot of skill and practice. Both are much more difficult than people think that they are.

My nephew does not have a lot of athleticism and got into skeet shooting at his school. Not many schools have it and it is not sanctioned by his state's athletic association which is Tennessee. It is really a club level sport. He attends a private school and they competes against a few others that have it. He had never tried it before and never went hunting or anything but is now pretty good at it. Tennessee's Clay Target League website is below. If the OP is interested in it they should look to see if their state has something. I think that most states do. Again, as with bowling & archery, it takes practice to be good.

tn.usaclaytarget.com

Home - Tennessee State High School Clay Target League

Drew Tri

Link:tn.usaclaytarget.com/

Golf is becoming one of the more competitive sports especially at big high schools in suburban districts. My son's friend is going to a high school with about 3,300 kids. 90 kids tried out for JV golf. They have 20 kids on JV and another 20 on Varsity. They also have a developmental program with another 40 kids because the cut for JV is so close that kids who shoot mid 80s often do not make it but can improve a lot as they get bigger and stronger. So, the school keeps tabs on them with the developmental program. Only 8 kids on JV and 8 kids on Varsity get to play in tournaments. JV tournament players are low single digit handicaps and varsity are scratch golfers.

The story is basically the same for all other sports. If your kid hasn't gotten highly specialized in the sport they want to play in HS when they are in junior high, they aren't going to get to play. Most of the big team sports (basketball, football, baseball, soccer) are made up of kids who have made it on to travel squads or are starting on very competitive JV teams. The odd exception is the kid who has a growth spurt and ends up 6'2" and over 300 lbs. The football coaches will usually pull them out of the crowd and put them on the offensive line.

A very different story at small rural schools or small private/parochial schools. But at the big high schools, the best kids will do is intramural sports if they exist. Some schools make big sports like football and baseball no cut sports just so they will have a lot of kids to draw upon if their are injuries, disciplinary/academic problems, etc. They end up basically having three varsity squads. One actually plays games, the other is a practice squad that helps train the varsity team and the other is a developmental team of kid who want to try and move up to the practice squad.