A Warning For Parents Who Think A Sports Scholarship Actually Covers College Costs
A sports scholarship can be lucrative for some students by not in all cases. Your child concentrated on one sport from an early age, you spent a lot of money to give him or her the best coaches and biggest advantages, and you did it — you beat the odds, and your child is one of the 2 percent of high school athletes that got an offer to play competitively at a college that offers athletic scholarships.
Guess what? You’re still paying big bucks to send your kid to college. NCAA rules, designed to spread talent more evenly across schools, limits scholarships for every sport, and except for a few sports (football, men’s and women’s basketball, notably), nobody gets a full ride from day one. Often they don’t even get that in year four.
And yet even though the information on scholarship limits is widely available, parents continue to find themselves shocked that the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars they spent on sports isn’t making a big dent in their college costs — that is, if they’re even lucky enough for their child to have survived the youth sports process uninjured and mentally unscathed.
I would highly recommend any sports parent — especially those who have younger children, and who have designs on them having a sports career — read this great piece in by Brad Wolverton in The Chronicle of Higher Education called “The Myth of the Sports Scholarship.” The piece concentrates on Allison Goldblatt, an Annadale, Va., native who showed great promise in swimming at an early age, and has concentrated on that sport since age 7. Now it’s time for her hard work to be rewarded with a sports scholarship. Except…
Wolverton followed Allison and her family as they talked to top programs, negotiating what kind of money they could get, which didn’t come close to the cost of school, assuming schools would even commit to a number, or even remember who she was and where she was from.
As any parent seeking any scholarship — academic or athletic — knows, the process is difficult and demoralizing. And I know: I have a son who is sophomore at Ohio University, and a daughter who is planning to start next year at the University of Iowa.
Sourced from Forbes.com by Bob Cook
