Curious and despite many google attempts can’t find the info? I presume the top sports are football, basketball… soccer? It gets fuzzy after that. Swimming? Track and field? Is there any data out there?
Thanks!
If you’re asking about mens NCAA full scholarship sports, there are a limited number of sports…
There are other NCAA mens sports that only award partial scholarships.
What is your sport and are you looking for an athletic scholarship? If so, a full one?
The NCAA website might have the info you are looking for.
I have heard that there is a lot of recruiting and full rides for ice hockey (not here in Texas, alas! Football and basketball are big ones. So is baseball, but perhaps to a lesser extent. Colleges recruit for swimming, water polo, cc, track and field, tennis, wrestling, soccer and other sports but rarely provide full rides to those athletes.
First of all, are you asking for men or women atheletes? What universities? For women (this can change quickly) it is golf and tennis are big draws. Lacrosse for both. Football, totally male. Baseball and softball…some.
Two of our kids were recruited. We didn’t follow it up, but we could have. Please note: at high power sports university most kids really can’t participate in classes. You work your class schedule around your training.
D1 Men’s scholarships are extremely limited outside of football, where every player is on a full ride. To make things “fair” and equitable, women’s sports must be given the same number of scholarships, despite having fewer athletes overall. Worked out really well for our DD, not so much for our DS. And while they were in non-revenue sports, the practice requirements were intense, yet they were able to take all classes needed for whatever major they decided upon. Not sure I would agree with @bevhills assessment about not participating in classes…the school my DD ended up at was not all that unique in its peer group in that they expected the high level academic kids to take very demanding majors. This was not the case at some of the schools that recruited them, but they were quickly eliminated from the list. Do your HW. If they tell you you can’t be an engineer (or other tough, high intensity major), plan on being a “fuzzy” major and be ok with juggling classes around practice and not vice versa.
Good luck. Being a student athlete is great, but given the choice of doing it again my DD might choose differently. It consumes your free time and changes the experience drastically.
umm…football, football and football. Only 4 offer full rides…football, men"s and women"s basketball and women’s volleyball. Average athletic scholarship is $10,400. Over 1 million boys play HS football…about 19,500 scholarships are handed out. 603,000 girls compete in HS track for about 4,500 scholarships.
only 138,000 total scholarships offered in Division 1 and 2 overall. Division 1 soccer coaches are given 10 but they can divide it up into smaller pieces to make more if they wish.
All sports are recruited and if it is the sport you want, you are looking for the most scholarship money you can get. The number of scholarships available for each sport varies, whether a full ‘head count’ scholarship is required depends on the sport and the NCAA division the school participates in. Head count sports, football and basketball for men and gymnastics, basketball, volleyball, and tennis for women in the Division I schools, the entire scholarship has to go to one student. In all other sports, in Divisions I and II, a scholarship can be sliced and diced and given to as many players as the coach wants (there are some limits), so is basketball, which has 16 athletes with full scholarships ‘more’ recruited than the swimming team which may only have 10 scholarships but divided among 30 athletes? Men’s D-1 lacrosse often has a team of 40 with 30 or more of those students sharing 12 scholarships. You can bet there are hundreds of students who want part of those scholarships.
If you are talking pure money, football is king. There are just so many full scholarships that no other sport can ever catch up. Men’s and women’s basketball and hockey are higher as a percentage as the entire teams are pretty much on full scholarship (football, D-1, FCS has 85 scholarships but also 30 non-scholarship players, but basketball has 16 scholarships and maybe 4-5 students not on scholarship, hockey has 18 scholarship usually divided among 21 or 22, but not all that many schools have hockey teams and 8 of those are Ivies, so no scholarships).
You are not going to find data to show ‘$2M in scholarships to swimmers in scholarships’ and even if you did it would be meaningless as the amount to each athlete. A swimmer at Fordham might be getting $4000 and one at Tenn 25%, and the Tenn student may be getting $5k, so the Fordham student has to pay $56k OOP while the Tenn student pays $15k. Schools don’t have to even publish if they fully fund the program, so while Tenn can award 10 swimming scholarships, it might only fund 8.
It is a numbers game.
Long and short, it is D1 football. Per the dictates of title IX, approximately 44% of scholarships are required to be given to women’s sports. Thus, the large number of full scholarships that are given to football have a direct nexus to almost every other sport. What most people do not realize is that outside of football and basketball (mens), most athletic scholarships are not full scholarship, and are divided-up among an entire team.
Thus, by way of example, men’s volleyball at D1 has only 4.5 total scholarships for a team that might include 13-14 members. Common practice is to half each of these scholarships–with the remaining of members of the team being walk-ons. I went to school on an full athletic scholarship, albeit almost an eternity ago…
The other thing about volleyball relates to the number of D1 teams to begin with-in the 20’s for men, 300+ for women last time I looked a few years ago.
As noted above, my understanding is that there are only four NCAA sports where most are on full rides in division 1 - football, men’s and women’s basketball, and women’s volleyball. Even in these there are exceptions, e.g. some women in volleyball might get a full ride for 3 of their 4 years, and in all sports there are walk ons who don’t get any money.
This excludes the Ivy League and Patriot League, which are D1 but don’t have athletic scholarships.
Other sports are what the NCAA calls equivalency sports, e.g. in women’s track there are the equivalent of 18 full rides but rosters usually have 40+. Coaches can give full rides to stars if they want but most will be on partial scholarships.
On average 1-2% of high school athletes will go on to play D1 college, plus others who play at D2, D3 or NAIA schools.
Even for a student that doesn’t get scholarship money, being someone a coach wants can make a significant difference in admissions.
Just as a clarification, women’s volleyball (D1) has twelve full scholarships, but the average team is about 15-17.
I have been told that womens golf is the most difficult sport to recruit for for colleges due to the lack of teenage girls playing the game.
As others point out, only a relatively few sports have full ride scholarships for students they recruit, and that outside of football and basketball for men, relatively few players get the full ride scholarships common in division 1 college football and basketball. With other sports, there may be some full ride scholarships for an exceptional talent, then a lot of partial ones and so forth. If looking for a full ride scholarship out of sports, unless you are a top recruit out of high school in a limited number of sports, you aren’t likely to get a full ride…but you might be able to pick up at least some money if you are recruited for other sports. Interestingly, I have read in a couple of books that it is possible to get a full ride scholarship for cheerleading as a sport, but I have never checked to see if that is even true and who offers them.
Lots of recruitment for hockey and soccer, and even if full athletic scholarships are not available, many schools, including Ivys, will find the $$ necessary for top recruits.
Patriot League now offers athletic scholarships…details here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_League
I work for a school that is both a high powered athletic and academic school. If you are a D1 recruitable athlete and a strong student there are some great schools out there that would love to have you AND will not just allow you to, but expect you, to participate in classes. There are certainly those where that is not the case for most athletes, particularly in the revenue producing sports, but you can find lots of places that WILL help you reach your potential in both athletics and academics.
And yes…football is a huge problem re Title IX. If needs to be removed from the scholarship count somehow. The huge numbers skew everything to create real disparity in scholarship opportunities for men in other sports.
If you are aiming towards Ivies and similarly selective schools, fencing, squash, water polo are sports where they would be interested in recruiting…it’s supply and demand. There are a zillion soccer players but how many squash players?
No doubt, if you play an obscure sport with some efficiency, then I would certainly look at say the Ivy schools which in some instances, field over 30 varsity sports. It is a great way to form a “hook” and it will provide some latitude on the scores required, but its not a free ride. I have a couple of old teammates that coached at Stanford and a couple of Ivy schools, and they have said, that while they could advocate for some athletes, it was NOT like they can make a 1810 SAT go away. In fact, often is the case, they will suggest going to a prep school for a year, to allow the student to raise the score. So, no one is getting in with a 25 SAT, but if they like you enough as an athlete, a 29/30 might get you through the door.