I don’t think anyone suggested that homeschooled athletes should have to meet some standard other students didn’t, but rather that they should meet the same standards as the other athletes.

The counter to this is the problem that friends of mine have had. Their children were homeschooled and began taking college classes as teens or preteens. Because they were in college classes, they were not allowed to participate in high school sports. While the children’s intellectual development obviously far surpassed that of their peers, they still developed physically at the same rate as their peers and were in no position to join college sports teams. Why should they be penalized for being far above average?

Here, what you are describing is a practice among immigrant kids, for soccer. The school my wife used to teach at had a horrible soccer team, but many excellent Horn of Africa soccer players went to the school. But they played in a league outside of school. Only the kids that weren’t so good played in the school.

Here in the UK, whilst schools obviously do sport, it does not seem to have the role it does in schools in the US. Same goes for universities as well. Over here kids who are good at sport will tend to do their sport outside of school. For example if a kid is good a football (soccer for you Americans!) they may well play for their school side but their main sporting effort will be for a local team, sometimes the youth sides of professional teams.

Jim is right, as usual. For a long time, students were recruited into a school, developed as athletes, used to make the school name link to sports success, which is largely a fund raising tool, then the student, illiterate and uneducated, dumped on the street.

This happened at both high school and college levels. But the NCAA (national college athletics assoc) established rules for academic performance. So if you are an NCAA athlete, you’ve got to have a minimum level of academic performance or better. If a college does not comply, the college loses its NCAA status or is fined or whatever.

It does no on any service for high schools to feed academically unprpared athletes into the college system.

What does academic attainment have to do with whether someone should be allowed to play sport ?

If you want to read a good paper detailing many of the holes in home schooling stats and the constitutional arguments for registering home schoolers and why the need for standardized testing, follow the link below.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=980100

How do statistics of what home schoolers are alleged to have generally done matter to the evaluation of an arbitrary as yet unspecified student at some point in the future who claims to have reached a certain level of academic ability and wants to play football?