Athletic Support
Yes, some of the best scholarships go to sports stars, but only a relative few of them
Erin Reinhardt has it good. This fall, Reinhardt, 20, will be a sophomore at the University of California- Berkeley. But she doesn't pay a nickel of the nearly $5,000 in-state tuition (nor the more than $11,000 a year room and board). "I spend a couple hundred a semester on books," she says--and that's it. No interest-heavy loans. No dreary burger-flipping for cash. No worries.
Why did Reinhardt get such a sweet deal? Because in high school, she could pull 2,000 meters on a rowing machine at a clip only a handful of girls in the nation could match. Cal noticed, especially after Reinhardt earned a spot on the U.S. Junior Olympic Rowing squad, and today she rows for the Bears. "It's a really good deal," she admits with a laugh, "I mean, I would definitely have to get a job if I didn't have this scholarship."
To many cash-strapped students, athletic scholarships are the holy grail of financing strategies: Run fast, jump high, get paid with a dynamite education. But a sluggish economy isn't making it any easier to find a spot on a college sports team. Seven schools have cut teams this year because of what the University of Toledo's president has called "difficult economic times." (In April, Toledo dropped men's swimming and track and field.) Meanwhile, more high schoolers every year take up sports. "It's not like you can be a rec swimmer anymore and try out for the swim team," says Carol Iwaoka, of the National Collegiate Athletic Association's financial aid committee. "You have to show a certain level of talent at a very young age." But what exactly are the odds of getting an athletic scholarship--and how can you snag one?
Numbers game. Statistically speaking, the chances of playing college sports are slim. There are around 7 million student-athletes involved in high school sports. More than a million play football alone, and smaller sports, like soccer, draw over 600,000 teens a year. Yet, at the NCAA Division I level, college athletics' biggest arena, only 151,000 students play intercollegiate sports. (There are 75,000 athletes in Division II.) So what are the odds of, say, a high school basketball player going on to play big-time college hoops? Less than 1 in 100.
Getting money from a school because because of your silky jumpshot is even less likely. According to the NCAA, of those athletes playing Division I or II, only about half receive even some athletic aid (by NCAA rules, schools in Division III are not permitted to award sports scholarships). Athletes getting a deal like Reinhardt's are even rarer. That's because the NCAA limits the number of scholarships schools can give in each sport (at the high end is football, with a maximum of 85 per team; the low end is men's riflery, which maxes out at 3.6).
Bottom line: There just aren't that many scholarships floating around. Although a few sports, like football and basketball, are allowed only to give out full rides, the best most athletes in other sports can expect is a "partial"--which may cover everything from full tuition, with no room and board, to just a few hundred dollars for books. In its most recent survey of student-athlete aid, for example, the NCAA found that the average Division I men's swim team has 23 athletes--but fewer than seven scholarships. In women's crew, the average squad size is 54, yet most teams have just over eight scholarships. "A lot of people think everybody in athletics has a full ride," says Judy Rose, president of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics, "and that's just not true."
So how do you become one of the fortunate few? In sports like swimming or track, many schools have time standards that eliminate the ambiguity. If a woman swims a 50-meter freestyle in under 24 seconds, she'll get some money from Brigham Young University, for one example; under 23 seconds, she's got a full ride. But who gets what is less defined in other sports. "We eventually end up looking at personality and skill level," says Ed Kaihatsu, assistant fencing coach at Northwestern University. Everyone says they need a scholarship, he points out, but parents forget that coaches have access to the same information as the financial aid office.
Screen time. Before negotiations can begin, would-be jocks need to put themselves on coaches' radar screens. Most college athletes tend to play their sports year-round in high school. But, coaches say, there's more to getting a scholarship than just dominating your local soccer field. "We can't be everywhere to watch everyone play," says Elaine Michaelis, women's athletic director at BYU. It's up to the athlete to clue coaches in on where and when they're going to be in action. "Anytime you know you'll be in the vicinity of a school, or in a regional or national competition," she says, "let the coach know." Summer camps run by college coaches are also a great way not only to make yourself known but to get a bead on whether you like them.
Perseverance, for the vast majority of would-be college athletes, may ultimately be the only way to get a coach's attention. Take Josh Line, a walk-on to the football team at the University of Oregon. For a year, Line struggled to find his niche, working two jobs to pay the bills, putting on 30 pounds of muscle, and memorizing the 7,000 possible formations of the team's offense. Eventually, he clawed his way onto the Ducks' second team--and into a scholarship worth around $25,000 a year. By his junior year, he was in the starting lineup. "Sticking with it was the best decision I ever made," he says. Sometimes, it seems, playing the odds can pay off.
This story appears in the September 8, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.