I got data from some reliable looking web pages about the number of high school and college players of the big three college sports, and I don’t understand how it’s right. I’ve taught and subbed at a good number of schools, and I’ve only very rarely heard about the excellent player who is getting scouted for college teams. Have I not noticed, or is there something wrong with the data or the calculations?
According to what I found, .6% of HS players go on to play D1 basketball, 2.5% go to D1 in football, and 2.1% go to D1 in baseball. I assume the baseball number is actually low, because most of the great HS players sign a professional contract out of high school.
Some schools are known as good football or basketball schools. I suspect that kids who’ve been identified as prospects tend to gravitate towards those programs so the kids who go on to play D1 ball aren’t spread uniformly around the country. There are also regional differences, so places like FL, TX, OH, CA will get large numbers of kits in football for example, who might be attracted to other sports or to other activities.
Where did you teach?
The town I grew up in was a hockey powerhouse, and families would move to our town in order to get their kids in the hockey programs. It wasn’t so much the HS teams but the Pee Wee, Midget, Mites programs, but the talented guys who went on to the NHL played for our HS as well.
I know a lot of recruits come out of the South, where college football is played to a more competitive level, than out of the Northeast, where despite having more people there are fewer recruits because the game is not as much of a priority.
I would also imagine what school you teach at (“a good number” could mean 20 or it could be 3) is going to make a difference. Nobody is getting recruited out of a Fine Arts magnet school, and the tiny 100 person high school can barely field a team, but the 4000 person high school that goes to state every year might see their entire starting lineup get scholarships.
I also wonder how much of this you would have heard as a sub. Nothing disparaging intended, but I assume the notes for math class aren’t “Have them do this worksheet, watch this video, oh and Timmy is being recruited by Baylor”. Could just be you aren’t in the know for those connections. I looked it up after I graduated, and was stunned to find we had a few alums playing in college. I had no idea when I was student.
There are a good number of kids who may be included in those statistics who are going to play Junior College or at lower division schools that may not get much press coverage.
My former high school is a football powerhouse now and a couple years ago they had 22 seniors sign to play college ball.
Also, there’s a big difference between the number of high school kids that were actively recruited by a top-ranked college program and the number of high school kids who will ever be on a varsity, junior varsity, practice squad or reserve roster for a Division One school (which appears to be what your link is counting). Not all of the kids on those rosters were actively scouted to the point that unrelated teachers heard about it.
While division three schools do not offer athletic scholarships, by coincidence, :dubious: many academic scholarships seem to find their way to kids who play varsity sports at that level. I saw this with my academically gifted child who couldn’t dribble a basketball or soccer ball to save her life. She got a nice scholarship at Nerdy U of Chicago where athletics were a very low priority.
On Long Island where I live, the “big three” sports are not so big, but many students get rides in lacrosse, soccer, field hockey, and other “minor” sports. In the last twenty years my local high school has had just one big three sport ride at a D1 school, but probably about thirty, or so, rides in lacrosse and the other minor sports. No doubt some of those rides are only partials. I think they graduate about 125 kids a year now and back before 2000, it was under 100.
The numbers on the spreadsheet don’t seem so out of line to me. If anything, I might have guessed the baseball number to be just slightly higher than 2.1%. Those aren’t scholarship numbers, right? Just total number of players playing in D1.