Every year I get some kid in one of my classes who tells me that he doesn’t need to do well in my class or any other because he’s an athlete – “I’ve got skills!”
He tells me that he will be playing for a Division I school in a few years before going high in the draft and getting paid lots of money by some NFL/NBA/MLB franchise to do something with a ball.
So far, only a handful of my students – and none of those kids – have gotten that Division I scholarship, and only one has made it into the professional ranks.
That’s why today I greeted the young man I like to call “Soccer Stud” (a ninth grader on the varsity team) with this article.
A study of numbers provided by the National High School Federation and the NCAA shows that the participants in boys wrestling have the longest odds of earning an athletic scholarship. Boys soccer is a close second.
In those two sports, the number of Division I scholarships offered in a given year accounts for less than half a percent of high school participants.
The sport with the highest percentage of high school participants earning at least a partial athletic scholarship is girls golf at 1.6 percent.
Football ranks second, with 1.4 percent of its high school participants in a given year earning a scholarship at a Division I university.
“We stress to parents and students everywhere that you should participate in athletics for the values and benefits that sports can give, not because you want a scholarship,” said Kevin Lennon, the NCAA’s vice president of membership services.
I love my students. I love to watch them play at their games when I can. But I also know that their athletic careers are likely to end as they walk across the stage at their high school graduation – and that if it doesn’t, it will almost certainly be done once they finish college.
Might it not be useful for those of us in education – and the parents of our students – to remember these numbers before we make sports the end-all and be-all of our schools?
Don’t Plan On That Athletic Scholarship, Kid
Every year I get some kid in one of my classes who tells me that he doesn’t need to do well in my class or any other because he’s an athlete – “I’ve got skills!”
He tells me that he will be playing for a Division I school in a few years before going high in the draft and getting paid lots of money by some NFL/NBA/MLB franchise to do something with a ball. So far, only a handful of my students – and none of those kids – have gotten that Division I scholarship, and only one has made it into the professional ranks. That’s why today I greeted the young man I like to call “Soccer Stud” (a ninth grader on the varsity team) with this article. I love my students. I love to watch them play at their games when I can. But I also know that their athletic careers are likely to end as they walk across the stage at their high school graduation – and that if it doesn’t, it will almost certainly be done once they finish college. Might it not be useful for those of us in education – and the parents of our students – to remember these numbers before we make sports the end-all and be-all of our schools?Posted by: Greg at 05:53 PM
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