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"Put Me In, Coach" by Laurie Richter
excerpt from Chapter 3: Athletic Skill Assessment Many families have wasted a lot of time because of bad assumptions and pipe dreams about where their child can play. The athlete may have some inkling that s/he’s not a strong candidate for Division I play but doesn’t want to disappoint his or her parents, and s/he may not be ready to believe it either. Check your ego at the door; it’s time to be honest about your child’s place in the universe.  Waiting for the Call That Didn’t Come My friend’s daughter Sarah spent a very successful four years playing basketball. As a senior she was clearly the player the team was built around. She fi gured she was good enough to play in college and that D-I coaches would come looking for her. It didn’t happen. By the fall of her senior year, Sarah and her parents started to get a little panicky. They looked to Division III schools and found some interest. It was now very late in the recruiting game, and Sarah was lucky to fi nd two schools that would still consider holding a spot for her. If she had realized earlier on that she was probably not a Division I player, she could have expanded that search to include far more than two schools. Try to be as realistic as possible about where your child really fits. When you understand how competitive getting a college sports spot is, hopefully it will expand your thinking to consider a wider range of options, and you won’t lose valuable time as a victim of infl ated expectations. Sarah got tripped up for the same reason so many people get tripped up—her frame of reference for her talent was the small group of teams her high school played against. Your child may be the best or one of the best players on his or her high school team but it doesn’t matter. There are also college roster spots taken by international players that are not part of U.S. high school statistics. In 2004, there were approximately 18,435 high schools in the U.S. (National Center for Education Statistics: 2005). Here’s the number of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) freshman roster spots available for a subset of NCAA sports:
You do the math. The best player on every high school team may not be good enough to play in the NCAA and that includes all three NCAA divisions— never mind the full scholarship Division I level. In women’s basketball, which was Sarah’s sport, three out of four “best high school players” will not find a spot on a college basketball team. So rather than compare how good your kid is to the others on their high school team, what matters is how they stack up to the best players on every other high school team, and it’s pretty tough for you to assess that. You also don’t know how your high school program and the kids that play for it compare to other high schools. At a smaller high school with a program that is not as established, the best player on the basketball team may not even be competitive with the sixth man on a team at a very big high school with a consistently winning record. And don’t assume that if your kid plays club sports or Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) and is a strong player on that team that they’re as good as any other club or AAU player. There is a wide range of skills on these teams, some tournaments attract tougher competition than others, and different parts of the country emphasize different sports. For example, a travel baseball player from the Midwest is not going to have the depth of experience that a travel baseball player from California, Texas or Florida has because of the weather differences that limit the Midwest to a shorter season than the warmer climates. The Inside Track Every high school team has a best player, a whole lot of high schools are out there, and there are finite number of roster positions available to college freshmen. Matching your child’s skill level with the right program requires an understanding of a variety of college-level athletic environments. Most of us are aware that there are three divisions in the NCAA—Division I, Division II, and Division III. Other options include the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) and the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA). Let me familiarize you with the differences between Division I, II, and III. You can get more info about the NCAA, NAIA, and NJCAA on their websites (ncaa.org, naia.org, njcaa.org). Here are links to other excerpts from, "Put Me In, Coach": |
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