College Sports: Expectations vs. Reality

Imagine yourself playing college sports. What do you picture? Most of us picture a victorious decision to accept a full-ride to a huge state school. We picture a music montage for the practice grind, and then a huge play under the lights our freshman year. It’s four years of friendship, glory, and a shot at the pros.

But what are college sports really like?

In this post, we’re going to bust some common misconceptions about what it’s like to play college sports.

“It’s Like Highschool Sports, but Bigger and Faster”

While this is technically true, many players forget that in college, they’re on their own in a new environment. Adjusting to college can be very difficult for students, and suddenly your performance on the field is not about your highschool life. For many players, a new routine must be developed.

The NCAA has for years been putting out graphs and stats about the high Graduation Success Rate (GSR) of student athletes compared to other kinds of college students. But the stats are often a lot more complicated, because the headline is oversimplified. Certainly, college for athletes is more than just playing sports full-time. There are classes, a new city, adjusting to the next stage of adulthood, career paths, and a whole lot more. If you go off to play college sports, expect a completely different context for those sports than Friday Night Lights at the local highschool.

“If I’m Really Good, I’ll Get a Scholarship”

According to the NCAAs best guesses, the percentage of scholarship athletes is about 2% of highschool athletes. Most parents overestimate the ability of their child to play a sport. Additionally, these scholarships that players can get are not all full-rides. This stat is including partial scholarships that don’t even cover half of tuition, much less all the other expenses of college.

Additionally, the overestimates of parents are staggering. This might not surprise you, but about 40% of parents feel “confident” that their child could get an athletic scholarship. 40% and 2% do not match up, so we could say confidently that about 38% of parents overestimate their child’s ability by thousands of dollars.

So nope, being “really good” doesn’t mean you’ll get a sports scholarship. In fact, you have to be better than 98% of other student athletes. If scholarships are your goal, you’re probably better off focusing on grades and test scores. Merit scholarships can be easier to come by. You probably don’t have to place in the top 2% of the SAT or ACT to improve your chances of going to a great school.

“It’s Mostly Viral Videos of Me Choosing a Hat”

We’ve all seen the videos of talented highschool students sitting at a decision table with a number of school hats, agonizing over which letter of intent to sign their college career over to. While this moment is amazing and makes for great TV, it’s usually not like that. Most college athletes don’t have 3 or 4 awesome legitimate options.

Once the actual scholarship offers start rolling in, one school generally takes a pretty clear lead over the others. There won’t be much agonizing if one good state school offers you a full ride and the other good state school is asking you to pay $25K a year to spend most of your time playing sports for them!

“We’ll Have a Shot at a Championship”

Many great college players come from highschool teams that got used to winning a lot of games. But in college, there are the big winners, and then there are the people on the other side, experiencing the most disappointing losses in college sports. You might win a lot of games. You might have a great year your freshman year. Or you might lose more than you win!

Most college athletes don’t remember the championships and the big wins. You’re lucky if those are the best part of your career. Rather, it’s about the journey and the relationships along the way. The crowd can be awesome too though.

“If I Play DI Sports, I’ll Go Pro”

Sure, there are plenty of SEC stars that head for the first round of the 2020 draft. But statistically, less than 2 percent of NCAA student athletes who play DI sports go on to play professional sports. And of those 2 percent, it’s going to be very few who are wildly successful or are even playing in a sport that makes a ton of money. It happens, but it’s rare.

It’s super important to have mentors and advisors that you trust throughout the college sports process. These coaches have seen a ton of players, and generally have a good feel for who will have a shot at competing at the next level and who will not.

“I Won’t Have to Pay for College If I Play a Sport”

The full-ride is something of a legend, popular in every highschool movie ever where the top few players at the highschool receive full-rides to the college of their choice. According to the movies, every small town in America can send a half dozen of their athletes to Ivy and state schools for free.

The reality is much more complicated. Division I schools are the only level to offer the biggest scholarships. While DII schools often offer some money, the education is rarely free if you end up at these levels. Even in DI, there are a couple different classifications of sports: head-count and equivalency. Equivalency sports are required to offer partial scholarships for every full scholarship they offer, meaning that they are not allowed to get an entire free team.

Head-count sports include DI basketball and football for men, and gymnastics, tennis, or volleyball for women. If you’re playing outside of these head-count sports, don’t count on being eligible for a full-ride in the first place. It might happen, but many of the best players don’t receive them.

DIII schools can’t offer athletic scholarships at all, and Ivy League schools simply don’t offer athletic scholarships. Both of these schools will offer need-based or merit-based financial aid to help students through college. The best way to get paid to play sports in college, therefore, is actually to be a great academic student. If you’re great at sports and have high grades, you’ll increase your chances of getting scholarships.

Make the Most of It

Have a Plan

The “best” college athletes are the players that use the leverage college sports give them in order to make awesome plans for after college. For some players, this is going to be a big contract with a professional sports team. For other players, it’s going to be coaching, sports science, training, or working with a pro team in a different capacity. But for most players, it’s going to be something that isn’t related to their college sport at all.

Experience All of College

If you’re not going pro—and you probably aren’t—then college sports are a great activity in college to help you make friends, find a community, have fun, and hopefully get some scholarship money on the side. Allow it to make the rest of college that much better, but don’t let it dominate all of college at once!

Grab Your School Gear

No matter where you’re going to school, grab some school gear and start working toward your future! College sports may not be everything you expected—but in some way, that might just make them even better.

College Sports: Expectations vs. Reality to Current SEC Sports News

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