… "Anderson is one high-profile example of the myth of the full ride.
News of high school athletes signing with college teams comes in waves near the end of every sports season. Contrary to the perception of a lot of teenage students and their parents, the reality is very few of them are receiving a full athletic scholarship.
Only in football, men’s and women’s basketball, women’s gymnastics and women’s tennis are essentially all the Division I student-athletes on the team on full athletic grants.
For all of the other sports, the grants are split up among the players, to one degree or another." …
http://buffalonews.com/2017/06/30/myth-full-ride-paying-college-complex-puzzle-athletes/
The article tries to cover a lot of ground and some things get muddy. The above quote leaves out women’s volleyball as a ‘head count sport’ where the coach can’t split the maximum number of scholarships. The article later talks about hockey (both men’s and women’s) and those are teams where often the entire team is on full or near full scholarships. Women’s rowing is another. For football in big D1 programs, usually 30 players get no scholarships at all, more than 1/3 of the team.
“Contrary to the perception of a lot of teenage students and their parents, the reality is very few of them are receiving a full athletic scholarship.” I disagree. Most student athletes and their parents know from early on that athletic scholarships are partial and hard to get.
Also, irrespective of whether or not the student is an athlete, there’s a big difference between a full scholarship and a full ride!
That hasn’t been my experience. Soooo many soccer parents were convinced an athletic scholarship was going to be their golden ticket. I’ve seen families sink thousands of dollars and incredible amounts of time in travel teams, personal skills coaches, elite camps and the like only to not get the payout in the end. They’d have been better off having their kids play for their school teams and investing the money they spent in a college fund. Yes, I have seen some kids earn good athletic scholarships, but I’ve also seen some parents drive their kids incredibly hard, sometimes to the detriment of academics.
*that’s not to say travel sports and the like are bad, they can be great if it’s the kid’s motivation that is the driver as opposed to the parent’s hope for scholarship $$
While athletic “full rides” may be as mythical as unicorns, the athletic “hook” as entry-fee for the golden ticket to admission for elite universities is very real and attainable. I, personally, know only one student who received a “full ride” (volleyball-VT), but many who have translated successful high school athletic careers with decent but not superior grades and stats into acceptances at schools like Brown, NU, Chicago, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Georgetown, and Penn. Given the ever-falling acceptance rates at top colleges, that “hook”, more than the promise of a “full-ride”, is the goal of many sports parents that I’ve met on fields and in gyms over the past 10 years or so.