You're in a bubble. It's nowhere near that hard to get into non-elite universities, which the vast majority of college-bound students attend. Just keeping your grades up and doing well on a standardized test will get you into a good (well-regarded in at least some fields, very well-known at least regionally) state school—and the ones in the next couple tiers under that are even more lax. Then there are community colleges—ask nicely and they'll probably let you in at least on a probational basis, even if your grades were incredibly bad in high school and you don't have much else going for you.

And that's for the students that go at all.

[EDIT] Incidentally, from tales told by my various teacher friends, the students who genuinely have crazy-busy schedules are almost always the ones who are extremely into playing two or more sports. Even half-serious participation (so, maaaaybe gunning to play college ball, plus the mostly-delusional but fairly-common parental aspirations of having a pro-league kid) means being in a league that makes you travel a lot, and lots and lots of practice, for each sport, plus extra training camps and shit like that. I believe tales of some schools where the students are stressed over academics and non-sports extracurriculars (plus the single requisite sport to keep Harvard from binning your application) but out in the vast reaches of non-elite America, only a few students have very-high schedule pressure, and most (not all, but most) of those are because of a strong focus on sports.