For some folks, life never gets better than high school, which is very, very sad.
Most of the interesting and lovable people I know were and are late bloomers.
Oddly, two of the jock heroes at my high school became greatly successful in their jock fields. Of all the high school athletes, a small percentage play in college, and then a much smaller percentage of the college athletes go on to professional ball, and then among professional ballplayers, a few of them wind up as coaches. One of my high school classmates is an NFL coach, and another is a MLB manager.
There’s a trivia question: Which NFL coach and MLB manager were in the same high school class?
So they’re a lucky pair of guys. Not only were they hugely popular in high school as the star jocks, they grew as adults.