I wonder how other countries deal with athletics programs and the like. I'm sure other countries have schools similar to nenjin where the wealthy kids go and often look for the next potential soccer (that's everybody-else-in-the-world football) superstar and protecting the alumni dollars.
My experience is that we don't do that (systematically) at school-level. A whole range of sports were given (or, indeed,
forced) at school, long-suppressed memories that I'm dredging up specifically for this post tell me that it ranged from field/athletics sports, cricket and tennis ('summer schedule' outside sports), [assoc.] football and rugby [league and/or union, I can't remember which] (colder, wetter, muddier and frozen terms), basketball, badminton and various athletic/strength training exercises (gymnasium, with hoops, nets, mats, hurdles and ceiling ropes, etc, and at one point a static equipment room installed in an old classroom) and in the final year of tha school an old table-tennis table in a dilapidated upper-form rec-room was discovered and made usable as a self-directed 'option'. Oh, and the Cross Country, which must have been once-per-term, but
seemed to only ever happen when there was either cold, slippery mud or slipper,
frozen mud on key parts of the course (we were lucky if it wasn't wet in the air, in the former case, though it was probably postponed if
currently snowing) and I don't recall anybody doing more of this than was scheduled for us all.
Those with potential may have been representing the school in competition, locally/regionally/nationally (especially the football,
maybe the cricket) but there wasn't any obvious thing with the soccer-jocks in Letterman jackets (would have been against uniform rules, even if there
was such a clique), and perhaps there might have been the occasional announcement to the school assembly that some kid had earned an external trophy, but that would probably have been a parent pushing that info on the school most of the time.
Outside of school, I know one person who strted the path towards professional cricket (but I can't find what I remember of his name on County lists, assuming I even de-nicknamed him properly in my head). My own 'chosen' sport (not counting the table-tennis, which I pursued half-heartedly later on for a short time) was not a school-supported one. There were(/are still) organised school-age championships for this at regional and then national levels that could be entered by school
or standard-club teams, but I was never in danger of getting three of us together and doing our school proud, so never took it to that kind of scope (individual and personal competition, only, with no broadcasting of my 'accomplishments' in the school hall or anything).
Some schools will have had organised teams (including those of those school-age championship entrants I mentioned), but mostly I'd expect those youngsters talented in sports to have progressed through membership of non-academic clubs (adult, or extracurricular youth-schemes), with scouts attending amateur competitions to look for proteges for youth academy add-ons to the more commercial sports teams like football (association) and handegg (league/union - pick one, if you get the choice, and stick with it!). Though what with the Barry Burnell stuff, I know that didn't work out quite as intended for some…
This might go some way to show how the British/Home Nation teams have
not always been particularly world-class (read: mostly not at all, in World Cup Football), but has still produced noted successes from the bigger sports (rugby) down to the minority ones (curling).
And, obviously, this is an outside view of any jock-culture. I don't know how many here might not have been so near to the nerd-end of the spectrum in this same environment to have experienced the sharper-end of school-sponsored sports.
(The above being Secondary level education. I managed to mostly avoid sports at the Further and Higher levels.)
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