http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/s...hools-fight-for-basketball-recruits.html
Middle School Is Basketball’s Fiercest Recruiting Battleground
New York Times
By ADAM HIMMELSBACH and PETE THAMEL
June 25, 2012

...

The courtship of junior high players by private schools has become so cutthroat that it has spawned tales of coaches’ throwing one another out of gyms, traveling across the country to recruit middle school prospects and ingratiating themselves with local travel teams, independent teams made up of higher-level players, in an attempt to gain better access to players.

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I don't see schools and colleges making such efforts to attract
academic rather than athletic talent.

Or making the same effort to attract talent in music, art, drama, dance, leadership skills, public speaking or any of the other talents that should be nurtured.

The big difference is that athletic talent peaks early. If your human material is going to be used up and tossed aside by age 35 (at most) it makes sense to try and get them early. See recruiting practices (and training methods) for female gymnasts. Vs, say, philosophers. Or mathematicians.

Or are you actually bemoaning the fact that society as a whole puts more value on sports than intellectual disciplines? It is kind of built in, isn't it? Plus the whole panem et circenses thing...

People rarely get Nobel prizes in the sciences or the Fields medal in math for work done in their 50s and 60s, so the age profiles of athletic and intellectual talent have some resemblance. Fluid intelligence peaks in the early 20s, just as athletic ability does. A good part of a scientist's research potential is used up by age 40, which is why getting tenure by then takes on great importance for individual scientists. One reason academic acceleration of the gifted is important is that it may increase the research "lifespan" by a large fraction. If one's best research is done by age 40, someone whose research career starts at 20 has 33% more peak years than a researcher whose career starts at 25.

It's a money thing: coaches get paid more with winning teams. It makes the school look good, no doubt brings in revenue. And it would not surprise me in the least if these coaches were working under the table for NCAA schools, given the strict recruiting regulations and recent severe consequences to schools like Indiana University.

A smart kid doesn't have the media power compared to a basketball prodigy to rocket a school into national recognition (a la Butler U. 2011).

[/quote]
People rarely get Nobel prizes in the sciences or the Fields medal in math for work done in their 50s and 60s, so the age profiles of athletic and intellectual talent have some resemblance.
[/quote]

Not according to this interesting article from Nature, published last fall:

"...with a few exceptions — notably the quantum mechanics discoveries of the 1920s and 1930s, which were often made by scientists under 30 — the trend across all fields is towards researchers being older when they produce their greatest work.... Comparing discoveries made before 1905 with after 1985, the average age at which physicists made their discoveries rose from 37 to 50. Chemists' average age rose from 36 to 46 and that of medical scientists from 38 to 45."

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111107/full/news.2011.632.html

Interesting article, thanks. Regarding the Fields medal, I see that it is restricted to mathematicians below age 40, so my statement about Fields medalists is tautologous.

Looking at the last sentence of the abstract below, it appears that sports success attracts students to colleges (and perhaps to private high schools, also). I don't really understand this, but tastes differ . Do other countries have college sports that attract a lot of attention?

The Benefits of College Athletic Success: An Application of the
Propensity Score Design with Instrumental Variables
by Michael L. Anderson - #18196 (ED LS PE)

Abstract:

Spending on big-time college athletics is often justified on the
grounds that athletic success attracts students and raises donations.
Testing this claim has proven difficult because success is not
randomly assigned. We exploit data on bookmaker spreads to estimate
the probability of winning each game for college football teams. We
then con- dition on these probabilities using a propensity score
design to estimate the effects of winning on donations, applications,
and enrollment. The resulting estimates represent causal effects
under the assumption that, conditional on bookmaker spreads, winning
is uncorrelated with potential outcomes. Two complications arise in
our design. First, team wins evolve dynamically throughout the
season. Second, winning a game early in the season reveals that a
team is better than anticipated and thus increases expected season
wins by more than one-for-one. We address these complications by
combining an instrumental variables-type estimator with the
propensity score design. We find that winning reduces acceptance
rates and increases donations, applications, academic reputation,
in-state enrollment, and incoming SAT scores.

College sports are not a big thing in other countries. My kids attended a French immersion school in the early elementary years; my youngest is still there. My eldest is going into her senior year in HS and is looking at colleges. When I speak with the folks from the immersion school - many of them grew up in other countries - they are perplexed by the US college admissions process. Most other countries base college entrance on an exam, and extra-curricular activities don't matter in admissions.

The reason why the coaches scout middle school kids is because they can communicate with them freely, anywhere & anytime, before they reach HS. The NCAA restrictions on communicating with athletes kick in once the kids reach HS.