Also, nerdiness translates well into marketable skills. Of all the people I knew in high school, exactly one ended up playing professional sports, and only then for two seasons.
OTOH, I can't count how many people I knew who ended up doing nerdy things professionally. I mean, I'm a professional nerd myself. One of my high school classmates wound up doing his PhD on soccer-playing communist robots.* There's a future in nerddom.
*Really! His thesis title was actually something about distributed strategizing and decision-making in autonomous AI networks with no defined heirarchy, but he used soccer playing robots to do his research, and "communist" sounds funnier than "distributed decision-making with no defined heirarchy".