At my high school, and at my college as well, the sports players are generally looked down upon by the 'gifted' or 'AP' students. I don't know how sports players compare to the average student, but the average GPA on our cross country and track teams always shocked me a little. Few of my friends ever got below 3.5, and the sports teams often had averages below 2. The football team (by rumor, I never actually saw the numbers) was the lowest gpa sport in our school.
NB I was using the UK sense of school - high or junior school. People here generally don't refer to universities or colleges as "schools" (apart from "law school").
