I know as usual I'm a bit late, but the comments about scholastic achievement got me thinking. In the area I live I have heard several parents saying they were choosing certain schools because it had a good sports program, but the academic program wasn't all that good. I found that rather shocking that a parent would trap their kids in that type of lifestyle. Even in sports that are more individual like cross country and track, I've seen parents take kids out of outstanding academic schools and place their kids in academically inferior schools for a better track program.
For a while my son was all about baseball. It's all he wanted to do when he grew up. I pointed out the pros and cons of professional sports. I explained how the heard gets thinned out as the age groups go up and the only way to be selected for the team was to continually improve his skills and that required practice. That is where I lost him. He'd rather play and goof off than practice a lot. This year he decided running was his thing (actually he has wanted to join a track team about five years). He is very good at running and consistently beats kids on the junior varsity team while he is only in his first year of junior high. His only bad race was his first, which was expected, because he blew his pacing and wound up walking a portion of the race. Even after that setback he still finished in the top 1/3 of runners (can you tell I'm a proud dad?). At first his grades started slipping, because he was thinking that he didn't need to know anything from school to be able to run well. Going from the experience of the baseball explanation, I went into the need to be able to manage any money won. The only way to do that was to be able to see through the BS any salesman tries to give him and that requires education. He bought into it and started working on his grades and they improved. I also pointed out again the low number of people who actually are able to make any substantial amounts of money in sports and to make enough money to live on he has to be one of the best.
I guess my point is, it is far easier to allow a child to believe they can make mass amounts of money playing sports and encourage that plan, even if it provides limited opportunities for the kid, than to force them to study and get good grades. From the sounds of the Dunning-Kruger effect, that could be one of the reasonings parents are using to let their kids focus more on sports than on academics. I also pointed out to the kid that if he can be financially successful with outstanding athletic ability, imagine how financially successful he can be with brains and athletic ability.