Athletic Recruiting Realities - Know Your Abilities

The Reality Check

A crucial element of finding the right college athletic program is to be realistic about your talent level. Everyone dreams of growing up and playing for one of the big time Universities. The truth of the matter is that very few athletes have the God-given abilities to compete at this level. While hard work and persistence can get you far, at some point physical attributes set in. There is an old adage that "you can't teach height". Well, that adage also applies to incredible leaping ability, squatting 1200 pounds, running a 4 sec 40 yard dash, and so on. While improvement is possible in every area, physical limitations do apply. On their web-site the NCAA estimates that less than 1 in 35 male high school basketball players (similar stats would apply to other sports) who graduate each year will ever play at an NCAA signatory(i.e. Div-1,2,or 3). If we assume that half of a given high school varsity squad is made up of seniors (e.g. 7 seniors per team), that means it will take on the average of five high schools to produce one NCAA basketball player. Since we read in the paper that some high schools produce several such players each year, we must assume that the actual number for the remaining schools is worse yet. In any case the bottom line is this: it's not easy to make a college team. It's harder still to get a scholarship to play a college sport (since some of the above positions are at D-3 schools that do not award scholarships). Finally, if you restrict yourself to only the high profile universities (e.g. Notre Dame, USC, Duke, Florida, etc...) the chances of making the grade are much smaller still. Obviously, we at Virtual Athletic Director are not trying to trample on your dreams. On the contrary, our goal is to help you navigate the maze of college recruiting. At the same time, we feel it is important to be realistic and recognize there are many options out there besides playing football for Ohio State. If you're good enough to make the grade - go for it! But if you're not capable of playing at this level, don't give up. There are many other options and in these next few pages we hope to introduce some of them to you.

Once you have performed this reality check on you abilities and physical attributes, you may want to ask yourself why you are interested in playing at a college level. Some possibilities:

• Looking to play at a professional level
• Help pay college expenses
• Love of the game
• Plan a coaching career

Perhaps this is a good spot to point out that playing any sport at a college level is hard work and requires a lot of discipline and devotion. It's no fun to come back to the dorm after practice and films and have to pick up the books to prepare for that test tomorrow. It's also not easy going out on the road for several days and having to catch up with those classes when you get back. All the items above are valid reasons for participating in a college sport - so long as you recognize the hard work that is involved.

But let's first talk about #1 - the professional sports aspect. As an example, the NCAA estimates the chances of a NCAA athlete going on to play professional basketball to be a little better than 1% or one in one-hundred. Using this number along with the probability of jumping from high school basketball to college, a clever statistician can estimate the chances of a graduating high school basketball player making the NBA. That number turns out to be somewhere around three in ten thousand. If we use the NCAA estimate of over 150,000 graduating high school basketball players in the country, or an average of 3000 per state, that would amount to about one graduating high school player per state making the League. Again, if we read the papers we know that in the large urban areas there may be several players that make the grade seemingly contradicting the statistics. But even in those urban areas it may be, in a good year, two or three players out of the hundreds of participating athletes that actually make it to the professional level. As a high school athlete you therefore need to ask yourself: Am I that one in several thousand that will make the professional level? Am I not only the best player in my school, but also the best in my league, one of the top players in my state?

If the answer to these questions is yes, you probably don't need Virtual Athletic Director to help you. You will have so many college and AAU coaches pushing you along you will have no need of our services. But if the answer to these questions is negative, we can help. And we can help by perhaps opening your eyes to some other possibilities.