Looking to go pro? These are the top high schools for athletes in the country (2024)

FAQs

What is the #1 high school in America for sports? ›

Participation in team sports results in a higher GPA for both high school boy and girl athletes. Physically active children are 15% more likely to attend college. Former student athletes tend to earn significantly higher incomes than those who did not play sports. Student athletes earn up to 40% higher test scores.

Traditional football is by far the most popular sport among male high schoolers in the United States. In 2021/2022, around 974 thousand boys played 11-player football.

High school sports provide competitive experiences for nearly 8 million student-athletes every year. That total has steadily increased since the early 1970s although it did dip slightly, by less than 1%, in the 2018-19 school year.

Football Continues to Rank as Americans' Favorite Sport

Trend in Americans' favorite sport to watch, from 1937 to 2023. Forty-one percent of U.S. adults in late 2023 name football as their favorite sport, well ahead of the next-most- popular sports, baseball and basketball, named by 10% and 9%, respectively.

In hockey, golf, tennis, baseball or soccer, an athlete can go pro at 18 or younger. In basketball and football, however, this is not the case. The NBA requires a player to be at least 19 years old to enter the draft, which means that players must spend one year playing college basketball.

Roughly speaking, there were 1,083,308 high school football players competing, and eventually 251 made it to pro. After simple calculation, we can get that the percentage of student-athletes going pro is approximately 0.023%. In truth, this number is not encouraging for anyone eager for a professional career.

Girls' wrestling has become the fastest-growing high school sport in the country, sanctioned by a surging number of states and bolstered by a movement of medal-winning female wrestlers, parents and the male-dominated ranks of coaches and administrators who saw it as a necessity and a matter of equality.

What is the number 1 growing sport? ›

What Is the Fastest-Growing Sport in America? The fastest-growing sport in America is pickleball, with participation among Americans ages 6 and older increasing 171.1% between 2018 and 2022.

Previous studies have found that 70% of children quit sports by age 13, and that girls quit at twice the rate of boys by age 14.

Тop 11 Best Sports for Girls. Girls are most often signed up for organized sports like ballroom dancing, swimming, figure ice skating, martial arts, and basketball. Gymnastics, horseback riding, tennis, skiing, and snowboarding, are also popular sports activity choices for girls.

Do many NCAA student-athletes go on to play professionally? Fewer than 2 percent of NCAA student-athletes go on to be professional athletes. In reality, most student-athletes depend on academics to prepare them for life after college. Education is important.

These are the top 10 most popular sports to play in America for high school boys, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations: Football: 1,006,013 participants (most popular sport in 43 states)

Mater Dei (Santa Ana, California) finishes 2023 where it started, at the top of the High School Football America 100 national rankings, powered by NFL Play Football. It's the Monarchs fourth HSFA national title since 2017. They also won our national crown in 2018 and 2021.