<p>High School to College Sports Participation </p>
<p>Sport HS Teams College Teams % HS to College</p>
<p>Football 14,048 725 5.2%</p>
<p>Lacrosse 2,436 330 13.5%</p>
<p>Baseball 15,632 902 5.8%</p>
<p>Crew 107 138 129.0%</p>
<p>Wrestling 10,488 220 1.5%</p>
<p>Good reminder! I was interested in the numbers for another sport. I found this link which covers most sports.</p>
<p><a href=“Odds of a High School Athlete making a College Team | Scholarship Stats.com”>http://www.scholarshipstats.com/varsityodds.html</a></p>
<p>What these statistics convey is that any high school kid who rows crew can easily row on the college level. I think the only requirement is that he would have two arms and two legs. </p>
<p>Lacrosse is next easiest. Any above average high school lacrosse starter can probably very easily get recruited by colleges since there are 330 college lacrosse teams and only 2,436 high school teams. I am sure this stat will change once kids from Florida and Texas start playing high school lacrosse. Then the unathletic prep school kids who populate college lineups will simply be outcompeted for college scholarships. The only reason that high school sophs are being recruited by college for lacrosse is because it is a seller’s market for high school lacrosse players. </p>
<p>Ultimately, wrestling in college is the toughest hill to climb as only the top 1.5% of high school wrestlers ever make it into a college lineup. Pretty straightforward facts that cannot be refuted.</p>
<p>So the next time you are at a cocktail party and you hear about a parent bragging that their kid is being recruited for lacrosse or crew, tell them that your beer is empty and ask them to get you another one.</p>
<p>If you run into a parent who has a college wrestler for a son, make sure you shake their hand as this is a remarkable accomplishment.</p>
<p>Everyone around here thinks that if their kid just starts soccer or football early enough and plays on a high level team they’ll be recruited by college coaches. I tell my friends that if that’s their goal they should have their kids try sports like fencing or crew, where a much higher percentage of athletes end up with offers.</p>
<p>I know kids who have rowed for only a year or two but have been recruited by some amazing schools. They had the general athleticism and the size for college coaches to see their potential.</p>
<p>If you want to get recruited for D1 (FBS and FCS) football, forget about it unless you have the measurables. Ivy League schools will not look at any kids unless they have the measurable. What I mean by measurables is height, weight and speed. So don’t waste your money on camps if you want your kid to play Ivy League football, his chances of being recruited were determined at birth.</p>
<p>D3 football is another story. If you are a tough kid who works hard, there is a place for you in D3 football. It’s not a cupcake ride though as, even on the D3 level, the student athlete will be consumed with hours of meetings and practices. If you don’t love football, don’t play it in college.</p>
<p>I’ve seen these stats before. No surprises. Crew and Lacrosse tend to be somewhat regional (limited demand with large supply), although I fully expect to see the lacrosse recruiting % numbers go down significantly in the coming years. It is growing fast, and more kids are playing it. It will be tougher to get recruited for lax in the future.</p>
<p>What would rock my world is to see NCAA stats by Sport and by Division for freshmen that play 4 years (include redshirts) all the way to senior graduation (or earlier). I think this would give potential recruits a real & genuine understanding of the important numbers. Every high school kid wants to play a sport in college…why not it’s fun and some of the good teams are on TV. Why the heck not? But the reality is different. It is extremely difficult to make a starting lineup in any sport at any level much less make it 4 years.</p>
<p>@recruitingexpert I found this list very interesting. My kid rows and is a recruited athlete, but having 2 arms and 2 legs was not the only requirement. In fact the recruiting was really competitive and harrowing.
Having a 4.0+ and 2100 SAT was required as well as subject test and a killer erg scores, winning regional and national competitions etc. </p>
<p>It ‘seems’ that there are many spots that are filled by walk-ons, but the sport is grueling. There are a lot of drop-outs. My kid’s high school team practices 3 hours a day, six days a week, 10 months per year. We come from a top-five program nationally and there are 20 seniors on the team. I believe 8 of them were recruited or ‘tagged’ for college teams. But to suggest it was easy is wrong. It was grueling over 4-5 years and they are all very accomplished students AND athletes. They are not your D1, 1500 SAT, 3.0 guys (football and basketball). </p>
<p>What looks strange to me is that it appears there are more spots than athletes to fill them so it would appear that all they had to do was sign up. I know from experience that that was not the experience of the athletes on our top Nationally-ranked team. Most did not make the cut or did not make it in the school of their choice. Perhaps if you are willing to go to any school and row you will find a spot somewhere, but 100% of our athletes are students first and made their decisions based on academics. No one becomes a professional rower, so there are no starry-eyed kids imagining the NBA or NFL.</p>
<p>People should know that it may appear that rowing is the route to the school of their dreams, but there is no free lunch, they will pay the price in blood, sweat and tears many times over - and they have to be smart as well.</p>
<p>I wonder if those crew numbers are skewed because they only take into account HS rowing teams (of which there are few) and not club teams.</p>
<p>Yes crew can be very demanding, but the demands of college wrestling are off the charts (its generally acknowledged as THE toughest sport) and as recruitingexpert points out, no other sport comes close to wrestling in terms of the ratio of high school participants to the number of college slots available. Wrestling is very popular as the 6th most participated in high school sport with 10,500 high school programs nationally. This compares to Lacrosse which is not even on the top 10 most popular sports with only 2,400 high school programs nationally. At the same time, 330 college lacrosse programs exist across all three division vs. only 220 for wrestling (which has been decimated by Title IX). So there’s nearly 6x as many high schools with wrestling as there are with lacrosse, yet there are 50% more colleges offering lacrosse than wrestling. In addition, there’s only 10 starting slots in college wrestling vs. 14 in high school. The net of this is that only 1.5% of high school wrestlers can participate in college vs. 14% for lacrosse…basically its 10x harder to find a spot in college for wrestling than its is for lacrosse. No wonder colleges get “commitments” from high school frosh and sophs in lacrosse as there’s many many colleges looking for lacrosse players and relatively speaking, not many of them available. </p>
<p>I would like to see the stats fenway mentions above also. Also how many D1 athletes who do make the starting lineup all 4 years also are able to graduate in 4 years with no redshirt year. </p>
<p>Women’s crew allows 20 scholarships per school. That’s a lot. It was to even out some of the Title IX requirements at schools that have too many boy sports. Men’s crew has no scholarships. I don’t know if the schools make any admissions based on the commitment to row since it is really no commitment at all.</p>
<p>My daughter was heavily recruited by Div 3 lacrosse. Why? Because it doesn’t cost the coach anything! (and she’s good at lax, an URM, and from an underrepresented area for most schools). All money is merit or need based. What D1 and D2 schools really like is a student who can get 50% or more tuition from merit, parents can pay 25-40%, and the team needs to only come up with 10-15%. One of my daughter’s teammates is getting an 80% scholarship from her D1 team in 2015. Of the 12 scholarships available, usually the Sr/Jr get 8 or so, leaving only 4 for the Fr/So to split. If one player gets 80% of one of those, well, that’s tough on the team morale. </p>
<p>I’m not sure that winning a national crew competition is such a daunting achievement, given the low participation. That’s equivalent to saying you have the national record for the 138 yard dash.</p>
<p>I don’t think there are too many middle schoolers BEGGING their parents to let them try out for crew. Let’s face ot, parents encourage their unathletic kids to go out for crew, squash and lacrosse in order to increase their chances of acceptance to NESCAC type schools. If these same crew allstars ever wrestled, they’d quickly earn the nicknames of “Salmon”, “Mackerel” and “Haddock” and would be gakking in the bucket after 10 minutes of the first practice. On the other hand, if you put the wrestlers on the erg machine, they’d have to get a new one because machine wouldn’t be able to record a high enough score. </p>
<p>Don’t even get me started on lacrosse. If you left 10 lacrosse sticks lying on the field after the LSU football team was done with practice, I guarantee if those kids picked them up they’d be able to beat the Middlebury lacrosse team in less than a week.</p>
<p>Can Middlebury football team beat Middlebury lacrosse team after a week of practice?</p>
<p>recruitingexpert - You clearly are a wrestling fan! I agree that wrestlers are not appreciated near enough for their athleticism and/or work ethic. My kids are swimmers and they have the same issue. Now, the really good lacrosse players are true athletes - but it is easier to make it to college in lacrosse. Swimming is alos a low percentage of kids that make it to college. I think some of that number has to do with burn out - too many swim parents pushing thier 9 and 10 year olds too hard. My DS is being recruited now and I try really hard to advise the younger parents to not push their kids too hard - they should be playing other sports until at least 9th grade!</p>
<p>recruitingexpert-
I get that you are a wrestling fan and you understand the rigors of the sport, but just because you don’t have a similar understanding of crew is no reason to trash the sport. It’s like a rower saying, “Wrestling doesn’t require any stamina or mental grit. It’s just a bunch of guys rolling around on the floor doing what I did with my brothers when I was 5.” (yes, I understand that’s not at all true)</p>
<p>Crew takes incredibly hard work, stamina, balance, coordination, timing and mental determination. It’s the only sport I know of where bleeding and throwing up are considered signs that you did a good job. Imagine having to compete on a regular basis with hands that look like this:
<a href=“http://www.twrc.rowing.org.uk/slug/bigblister.jpg”>http://www.twrc.rowing.org.uk/slug/bigblister.jpg</a>
<a href=“http://www.row2k.com/features/789/Swiss-Cheese-Hands--the-care-and-feeding-of-rowing-blisters/1/#.U3EZRShZ2Dc”>http://www.row2k.com/features/789/Swiss-Cheese-Hands--the-care-and-feeding-of-rowing-blisters/1/#.U3EZRShZ2Dc</a>
<a href=“http://rowingchicks.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/kimblisters-300x225.jpg”>http://rowingchicks.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/kimblisters-300x225.jpg</a></p>
<p>As varska pointed out, the numbers of high school->college rowers are skewed by the fact that most recruitable rowers who attend public schools are rowing for club teams. There are very few public schools with rowing programs because it’s just too expensive to to buy and maintain the equipment.</p>
<p>I guess I missed all the wrestling matches on TV this weekend because sports networks were making us watch lacrosse. Too bad there weren’t some wrestlers out there. I thought the players on both sides were terrific, so I’m sorry to learn the only true athletes are wrestlers. Wrestling is not a popular to watch.</p>
<p>My brothers played everything when they were young, but the only sport my mother made them stop was wrestling. Three of the four are involved in sports for their careers. Not wrestling.</p>
<p>Lacrosse is a niche sport played in only 22 of 50 states and at less than 2,500 high schools nationally. College rosters are dominated by players from elite east coast prep schools which are not known for being hot beds of athleticism and toughness. </p>
<p>Wrestling, on the other hand, is immensely popular in the US at the high school level (all 50 states and over 10k high schools have wrestling programs) as well as many other countries around the world. Its ethos is much more blue collar where the virtues of discipline, toughness and honor are central to the sport. In this way, it aligns very well with football as evidenced by recent comments from ESPN analyst and super bowl champion Mark Schlereth who says wrestling was his toughest athletic challenge and best prepared him for his successful pro football career. “Physically, it’s the most challenging sport I’ve ever been involved with and from a pure mental toughness standpoint, nothing beats wrestling. If you look around the NFL, it’s uncanny how many players have wrestling backgrounds.” </p>
<p>The point here is that lacrosse’s ratio of college to high school programs is nearly 10x greater than wrestling, so participating at the college level in lacrosse is much less of an achievement than that of other sports, particularly wrestling. </p>
<p>This thread has made me appreciate the 99.9% of threads and posters on this forum that convey factual, useful information and first hand experience. The stereotypes, misinformation and conjecture conveyed in this thread is laughable. </p>
