It is a major difference. There is a lot of sport at primary and high school but when you get to university it is pretty low key. There are university teams but unless you play you wouldn't know. Most sports players here don't have higher education all though as I said many rugby players did before it became professional. I would like all schooltheorumivetheorW values from umiversity. We had a free gym and heaps of clubs but we knew we were there to learn not play. Please note that although I went to school in the seventies I went to university in the nineties so my experiences don't match that well.
Outside the big three sports (football, basketball & baseball) this is true in the U.S. for college athletes as well. Most "traditional" universities have quite varied and sometimes extensive sports programs that no one outside their sports knows about. Many don't have football programs partly because they are very expensive. (Of the 10 UC campuses only 2 have football teams.) There are huge number of college athletes that get no scholarships, and very little is noticed about their sport outside family/friends except for the few elite around the Olympics.
