Parents often harbor unnecessary fears at the prospect of homeschooling high school, thinking that their kids will miss out on sports, extracurriculars, graduation, and the prom. In my experience—and we’ve just graduated our second homeschooled student—that just isn’t the case. It may require extra time, driving, and dedication on your part, but with our numbers growing and homeschooling increasingly recognized as a viable and successful educational option, the possibilities are endless. Today I’m going to focus on one of these areas.

Sports and Related Extracurriculars

More sports teams are popping up as the number of high schooled homeschoolers continues to rise. Most of these teams are started and coached by parents who are passionate about these sports and want their kids to be able to participate in them, too. Bonus for the coach: you don’t have to teach classes all day at the local high school in order to experience the joy of coaching what you love!

Depending on the number of homeschool teams in your area for a particular sport, you may play against other homeschool teams or in conferences that also include private or Christian schools. We’ve done both.

Our kids participate in a band/choir program that works with local home and privately schooled students. Because we have homeschool high school football, two of our kids are able to perform in the halftime show at home games. Our 14-year-old son plays clarinet in the marching band and our 12-year-old daughter is on the flag team.

I love the absence of labels: our son’s dream is to play major league baseball, but he’s in the band. There’s no “jock” or “band geek” label attached to him.

If you don’t yet have homeschool sports teams in your area, maybe you are what it takes to help make it happen.

Here are some photos from our first varsity football game last night. The halftime show featured music from Pirates of the Caribbean. [Note the awesome costuming, especially from the student band directors. How often do you see a pirate directing a band?]

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[This post originally appeared at The Homeschool Post.]

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