<p>To those of you who believe you or you kid will get a "free ride" to college based on athletics, please read. Athletics is a great way to add to the college experience, and athletic participation/success certainly adds to the quality of an application, but be careful doing it just to get a scholarship.</p>
<p>p.s. I am sensitive to the fact that this is copyrighted material, so I have redacted some paragraphs here. Please go to The</a> New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia and create a free account if you wish to read it there. They have a great online news site.</p>
<p>March 10, 2008
The Scholarship Divide
Expectations Lose to Reality of Sports Scholarships
By BILL PENNINGTON
At youth sporting events, the sidelines have become the ritual community meeting place, where families sit in rows of folding chairs aligned like church pews. These congregations are diverse in spirit but unified by one gospel: heaven is your child receiving a college athletic scholarship.</p>
<p>Parents sacrifice weekends and vacations to tournaments and specialty camps, spending thousands each year in this quest for the holy grail. </p>
<p>But the expectations of parents and athletes can differ sharply from the financial and cultural realities of college athletics, according to an analysis by The New York Times of previously undisclosed data from the National Collegiate Athletic Association and interviews with dozens of college officials.</p>
<p>Excluding the glamour sports of football and basketball, the average N.C.A.A. athletic scholarship is nowhere near a full ride, amounting to $8,707. In sports like baseball or track and field, the number is routinely as low as $2,000. Even when football and basketball are included, the average is $10,409. Tuition and room and board for N.C.A.A. institutions often cost between $20,000 and $50,000 a year.</p>
<p>People run themselves ragged to play on three teams at once so they could always reach the next level, said Margaret Barry of Laurel, Md., whose daughter is a scholarship swimmer at the University of Delaware. Theyre going to be disappointed when they learn that if theyre very lucky, they will get a scholarship worth 15 percent of the $40,000 college bill. Whats that? $6,000? </p>
<p>Within the N.C.A.A. data, last collected in 2003-4 and based on N.C.A.A. calculations from an internal study, are other statistical insights about the distribution of money for the 138,216 athletes who received athletic aid in Division I and Division II.</p>
<p>¶Men received 57 percent of all scholarship money, but in 11 of the 14 sports with mens and womens teams, the womens teams averaged higher amounts per athlete.</p>
<p>¶On average, the best-paying sport was neither football nor mens or womens basketball. It was mens ice hockey, at $21,755. Next was womens ice hockey ($20,540).</p>
<p>¶The lowest overall average scholarship total was in mens riflery ($3,608), and the lowest for women was in bowling ($4,899). Baseball was the second-lowest mens sport ($5,806).</p>
<p>Many students and their parents think of playing a sport not because of scholarship money, but because it is stimulating and might even give them a leg up in the increasingly competitive process of applying to college. But coaches and administrators, the gatekeepers of the recruiting system, said in interviews that parents and athletes who hoped for such money were much too optimistic and that they were unprepared to effectively navigate the system. The athletes, they added, were the ones who ultimately suffered.</p>
<p>Coaches surveyed at two representative N.C.A.A. Division I institutions Villanova University outside Philadelphia and the University of Delaware told tales of rejecting top prospects because their parents were obstinate in scholarship negotiations.</p>
<p>I dropped a good player because her dad was a jerk all he ever talked to me about was scholarship money, said Joanie Milhous, the field hockey coach at Villanova. I dont need that in my program. I recruit good, ethical parents as much as good, talented kids because, in the end, theres a connection between the two.</p>
<p>The chase for a scholarship has another side that is rarely discussed. Although those athletes who receive athletic aid are viewed as the ultimate winners, they typically find the demands on their time, minds and bodies in college even more taxing than the long journey to get there.</p>
<p>There are 6 a.m. weight-lifting sessions, exhausting practices, team meetings, study halls and long trips to games. Their varsity commitments often limit the courses they can take. Athletes also share a frustrating feeling of estrangement from the rest of the student body, which views them as the privileged ones. In this setting, it is not uncommon for first- and second-year athletes to relinquish their scholarships.</p>
<p>Kids who have worked their whole life trying to get a scholarship think the hard part is over when they get the college money, said Tim Poydenis, a senior at Villanova receiving $3,000 a year to play baseball. They dont know that its a whole new monster when you get here. Yes, all the hard work paid off. And now you have to work harder.</p>
<p>Lack of Knowledge</p>
<p>Parents often look back on the many years spent shuttling sons and daughters to practices, camps and games with a changed eye. Swept up in the dizzying pursuit of sports achievement, they realize how little they knew of the process.</p>
<p>Mrs. Barry remembers how her daughter Cortney rose at 4 a.m. for years so she could attend a private swim practice before school. A second practice followed in the afternoon. Weekends were for competitions. Cortney is now a standout freshman at Delaware after receiving a $10,000 annual athletic scholarship.</p>
<p>Im very proud of her and it was worth it on many levels, but not necessarily the ones everybody talks about, Mrs. Barry said. It can take over your life. Getting up at 4 a.m. was like having another baby again. And the expenses are significant; I know I didnt buy new clothes for a while.</p>
<p>But the hardest part is that nobody educates the parents on whats really going on or whats going to happen. </p>
<p>When they received the letter from Delaware informing them of Cortneys scholarship, she and her husband, Bob, were thrilled. Later, they shared a quiet laugh, noting that the scholarship might just defray the cost of the last couple of years of Cortneys youth sports swim career.</p>
<p>The paradox has caught the attention of Myles Brand, the president of the N.C.A.A. </p>
<p>The youth sports culture is overly aggressive, and while the opportunity for an athletic scholarship is not trivial, its easy for the opportunity to be overexaggerated by parents and advisers, Mr. Brand said in a telephone interview. That can skew behavior and, based on the numbers, lead to unrealistic expectations.</p>
<p>Instead, Mr. Brand said, families should focus on academics.</p>
<p>The real opportunity is taking advantage of how eager institutions are to reward good students, he said. In Americas colleges, there is a system of discounting for academic achievement. Most people with good academic records arent paying full sticker price. We dont want people to stop playing sports; its good for them. But the best opportunity available is to try to improve ones academic qualifications. The math of athletic scholarships is complicated and widely misunderstood.</p>
<p>Despite common references in news media reports, there is no such thing as a four-year scholarship. All N.C.A.A. athletic scholarships must be renewed and are not guaranteed year to year, something stated in bold letters on the organizations Web site for student-athletes. Nearly every scholarship can be canceled for almost any reason in any year, although it is unclear how often that happens.</p>
<p>In 2003-4, N.C.A.A. institutions gave athletic scholarships amounting to about 2 percent of the 6.4 million athletes playing those sports in high school four years earlier. Despite the considerable attention paid to sports, the select group of athletes barely registers statistically among the 5.3 million students at N.C.A.A. colleges and universities. </p>
<p>Scholarships are typically split and distributed to a handful, or even, say, 20, athletes because most institutions do not fully finance the so-called nonrevenue sports like soccer, baseball, golf, lacrosse, volleyball, softball, swimming, and track and field. Colleges offering these sports often pay for only five or six full scholarships, which are often sliced up to cover an entire team. Some sports have one or two full scholarships, or none at all.</p>
<p>The N.C.A.A. also restricts by sport the number of scholarships a college is allowed to distribute, and the numbers for most teams are tiny when compared with Division I football and its 85-scholarship limit. </p>
<p>A fully financed mens Division I soccer team is restricted to 9.9 full scholarships, for freshmen to seniors. These are typically divvied up among as many as 25 or 30 players. A majority of N.C.A.A. members do not reach those limits and are not fully financed in most of their sports.</p>
<p>Griffin Palmer contributed reporting.</p>