I know everybody is concerned about the Varsity issue, but some schools are so large that just making the team is huge, I am going to assume their school is probably this way since he was Team Captain for 2 yrs. It maybe that Varsity at their school is for SRs only, due to the sheer size of the school. I know at our DS1 school that was how it worked. You had almost 0% chance of making Varsity as a jr., unless you were a player that would most likely be looked at by college scouts. This is a school that has been district and state champs for yrs., so it was not like they needed to pull up kids from the younger yr groups to be competitive.
I do agree the weakness in their profile is volunteer hours, BUT it also needs to be recognized that it is not necessarily the quantity they look for, but the quality and the commitment. Just throwing in more hours to say I have more hours might not change one thing. They can see through this from a board perspective because all of the sudden at the last minute the candidate is throwing on a heap of new things to strengthen their resume, not because they are committed to the reason they are volunteering.
Sometimes candidates forget the amount of hours they do during the yrs. For example, NHS in our area requires the student to do 24 hrs per semester, they can choose between Habitat for Humanity, Relay for Life, and the Food Bank. Our church to be confirmed requires 60 hours of volunteering, confirmation is at the end of 9th or 10th grade depending on the child. Our children, all 3 of them forgot about this when they were filling out their applications. It may have been mandated for other reasons, but it still counts for volunteering. Add it up and they had close to 200 hours, yet to them they didn't think those hours counted because it was required for some other reason and not truly volunteer.
I am not giving excuses, but if you put together that the candidate did sports for @ 8 months out of the yr (soccer and track), plus throw in SAT/ACT testing 4 times in a yr, and 20-30 hrs a yr, that leaves very little time to do more volunteering on weekends.
We also do not know if the candidate has a job because that too will leave little to no room for more volunteer hours.
The goal is to illustrate that you are not just book smart, that you are able to manage your time in every aspect and still be academically competitive. They don't want just book smart cadet/mids.
OBTW colleges have the same perspective because studies have shown that students who have a life outside of school, transition better than the student who has lived their lives with their nose in the book.
