This time of year I have so many conversations with parents that go something like this:
This boy we know is such a good student and a great basketball player and he only got into some of his safeties. What happened?
I can't offer much insight into the specifics of that student's experience, since he's a total stranger to me and I know nothing about his applications, his background, or his college list, but I can and do say this to parents:
There are three critically important and related parts to success in selective* college admissions:
*How do I define "selective" colleges in the United States? Those that admit fewer than 50% of their applicants and that use a holistic admissions process.
Building credentials: These are credentials along several dimensions that admissions officers care about, typically falling into the buckets of Personal, Extracurricular, and Academic. The official record — for college admissions purposes — starts the first day of 9th grade.
Building the college list: This exercise can be fraught and emotionally difficult for a family. If you're first-gen college or were educated outside the United States, you have very little prior experience to go on. If you're not first-gen, parents often have their own ideas about what certain colleges are like (or, more realistically, what they think they were like 30 years ago), how qualified a student is for that school in the present, or how much/little XYZ factor will matter. A school that you might have looked down your nose at, or not even have heard of, when you were applying to college is all of a sudden a competitive one. (See the Great National Meltdown Over Northeastern Rejections a couple of cycles ago.) College lists require a lot of self-discovery and honesty (what do you actually want out of your college education? how much is it financially wise to spend?) and a big dose of expectations management. Parents can be a powerful force in modeling a healthy approach during list building.
Presenting credentials: This is an important mental shift that has to happen between 11th and 12th grade, because presenting credentials is just as important as building them. Assuming a student applies to college during the fall of 12th grade, they are presenting their completed credentials from 9th-11th grade, and whatever is on record during 12th grade by the time they apply (which classes they are enrolled in, for example). By fall of senior year, the opportunity to build their credentials for their applications has largely passed, unless they will be taking a gap year.
When someone is disappointed (whether directly or vicariously) with admissions results, I would examine each of those three phases of the process. Was there an issue with credentials building? With the college list and expectations management? With the presentation of credentials in the applications? (If a student runs out of steam or has other priorities by the time they get to the applications themselves, that's a problem.)
Each part of that puzzle has to fit together seamlessly for success in selective college admissions. If you haven't started the college admissions journey yet, use that framework — the three elements above — to prioritize what you should be focusing on and when.