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Hmmm, I guess I didn't really enjoy practice, but I never thought of practice being a reason to give up the game

it was lack of playing time that caused me to quit.  Just wasn't talented enough to earn snaps

Well, it was the prospect of lack of playing time that caused me to quit too.  The games are the payoff.  To be honest, I coasted in HS.  I mean, I lifted and and participated in off season conditioning but I did the minimum to get by and say I participated.  I never went to any camps.  I knew I was going to play and so did some other guys on my team.  That’s probably one of the reasons we weren’t very good.
I was also a little intimidated after going on a couple of official visits.  I walked in the locker room after a game and was looking at guys who were 6’5, 280 lbs. with full beards , tattoos, and covered in chest hair.  I had a wisp of a little mustache that a strong gust of wind could have blown off my face.  I wasn’t confident I could ever play in college after seeing some of those guys.

"Back in the day" (I graduated HS in the early 70s), nobody I knew had access to camps or decent coaching or conditioning or training or anything.  You went to practice and that was it.  A lot of guys played BBall (both types) to "stay in shape".

We did have summer baseball leagues that were less competitive than HS of course, but baseball.

There was no organized basketball.  The first real game I played was in the 8th grade.

Our coaches in the main had no technical expertise to provide.  We had no trainers and zero help with conditioning advice.

I graduated HS at 6'4" and less than 180 pounds.  

Ours wasn’t much more organized than that.  We had a weightlifting “class” that our coach was the teacher for.  It was basically just for football players.  But we’d head down to the stadium and the coach would be in and out as we loafed through our workouts.  It was more a social hour than getting anything really productive done.
It was the same thing during the summer leading up to practice starting.  Guys would go down and sign their names to the sign in sheet to show they had been there but none of us were really busting our ass to get in shape.  Do a couple sets of bench, do some curls, flex in the mirror, BS with each other, talk, run a mile and go home.
At the time I thought I was putting in the work to get better but I can look back now and see what a joke it was.  Hardly any supervision from the coaches.  They’d just look in from time to time and then either leave or go back to the coaches’ office and hang around.

Hmmm, I guess I didn't really enjoy practice, but I never thought of practice being a reason to give up the game

it was lack of playing time that caused me to quit.  Just wasn't talented enough to earn snaps

I didn't give up the game because of practice, I graduated HS, wanted to go to UF instead of playing football at North Duval Tech.  

I graduated high school at 6’10”, 200lbs (now 6’10”, 230). I grew from 6’ to 6’6” my 8th grade year. It took a while for my coordination to catch up to that growth. I played on a great small high school basketball team in southern Indiana. The teams we had my junior and senior years had three D1 players, a starter on the 1995 D2 national champions, a D3 All-American, and another 6’6” kid who played some NAIA basketball. We got to the final 8 of the state tournament my senior year and lost to the eventual state champions by two points back when Indiana still had the old one class tournament. Not bad for a high school of just under 250 kids. 

I played my first two years of college at Indiana State for two different coaches. I transferred out of that mess to Austin Peay. We had some good teams there. We were OVC co-champs for two years and made it to the dance in 1996. When I graduated I had a couple offers to play in lower level Euro leagues (Denmark and Poland). I was ready to go to Denmark but backed out at the last second. I just wasn’t ready to drop everything and move halfway around the world for what was really not that great of an amount of money. Also, to be completely honest, I was just tired of practice and the mental fatigue that comes with constantly judging your self worth based on your last time on the court. So I moved home, played a ton of 3-on-3 and men’s leagues, and got a teaching job.

Nowadays, at age 42, I rarely play anymore. I can still get up and down the court pretty well and can still dunk and shoot the ball pretty well. I was really a stretch 4 or 5 before that was a thing. I run half and full marathons and watch my kids in their sports. My oldest son is a pretty good player. He’s 6’4” and averaged 25 and 12 as an 8th grader this past season. He plays AAU for an Under Armour sponsored team based in Indy. My daughter is probably my best athlete. She’s one of those kids that’s just good at everything she does. She plays volleyball and basketball and runs track.  She’s also a very good self taught gymnast. My youngest is pretty good at legos and Minecraft and that’s just fine.

Never played a minute of HS sports. Instead, I found my little niche as the stat guy for football and boys basketball manager. During my sophomore year, I was offered to announce the starting lineups and never relinquished it. Yeah, I was the PA announcer, and that is something that has served me well in the years since.

I got bit with the referee bug in college, and now ref HS basketball and umpire fast pitch softball. I also judge competitive speech, which I didn't think I would enjoy, but I've come around on it.

My HS had a teacher that would introduce the starting line ups, and he'd do it as though it was a WWF match. 
Today they have an even more over the top version of that guy doing the same thing. They look similar, but it is not the same guy. 

This is something that changed radically in Georgia from 1970 to today.  Interest increased and then money followed with younger leagues and top notch equipment and camps and whatever.  I'm sure Georgia produced some D-1A guys in 1970 but not even close to what the state generates today even adjusted for the population increase from about 4 to 10 million.

That isn't just a Georgia thing, it is national:  
I've told this story here before but if you haven't heard it, I have a DVD of the 1969 RoseBowl.  This was defending National Champion and #2 ranked USC with Heisman Trophy winner OJ Simpson against soon-to-be National Champion and #1 ranked Ohio State so these were top-notch teams.  I expected the archaic graphics but what surprised me when I watched was that the players were normal sized people.  At least into the late 1960's even the best CFB teams still had 6-0, 200# linemen.  Today a guy that size couldn't get on the field unless he could run 4.5 in the forty yard dash.  
What I have heard/read is that prior to sometime in the late 60's or maybe early 70's weightlifting just wasn't an athletic thing.  Athletes ran and did military style calisthenics but they didn't lift weights.  Weight lifters were basically all just vanity cases who wanted to look huge but couldn't tie their own shoes because they had no flexibility.  They couldn't actually play any sports because if they tried to run/turn/jump they'd pull a muscle.  
Then some trainer figured out that if you combined your weightlifting with the appropriate stretching routine it was possible to become huge while still maintaining sufficient flexibility to play sports at a high level.  If you watched a high level bowl game from 1979 I think you'd find that the guys were almost as big as they are now.  The change occurred very quickly, in not much more than a decade such that, in my memory, football players have always been giants.  

#36 in red looks like Johnny Unitas