Scholarship Realities - Hurdles First

Scholarship Realities
by Steve McGill

This past summer, when I was interviewing for the position of sprint/hurdle coach at North Carolina State University (which I didn’t get), I was told that a big part of the job would consist of recruiting, which came as no surprise, and was actually something I was looking forward to. But what did surprise me was when the head coach told me that they’re allowed to offer a total of 12.6 scholarships to male athletes (for female athletes it’s 18). That sounded like a ridiculously small number to me, to the point where I wasn’t sure I had heard him right. When I went back home and looked it up online, I saw that I had indeed heard him right, in regard to NCAA Division I institutions. As he explained it, full scholarships are very rarely offered. Partial scholarships are the norm. And what percentage of scholarship an athlete may receive is determined by a number of factors.

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So let’s break it down. According to Meredith Rainey Valmon of momsteam.com, there are 44 track and field events contested at each Summer Olympics. In looking at her list, I noted that 21 are contested at the collegiate level. So if you have three athletes per event, that’s 63 athletes. But because almost all athletes compete in more than one event, and because that number includes relays, the number of athletes on a team is much less than that. According to Tasha Vanden Heuvel of collegerealitycheck.com, the average size of a DI men’s team, and a DI women’s team, is 39. So, that means, on the men’s side, that 12.6 scholarships are being distributed between 39 athletes. And on the women’s side, 18 scholarships are being divided between 39 athletes. Though the women’s number is higher (assumedly because of Title IX), the number is still low.

According to Vanden Heuvel, only 6% of high school track and field athletes compete collegiately, and only 1% receive a scholarship. In addition, the average scholarship is a one-year deal that may or may not be renewed the following year. I personally have heard on more than one occasion of athletes losing their scholarship due to not meeting some type of standard — not qualifying for the conference championships, not scoring at the conference championships, not qualifying for nationals, not competing in enough meets, not hitting target times, etc. As a result, athletes often feel compelled to train and compete through injury, and to view their own teammates as rivals, creating a tense atmosphere that can in the worst cases become toxic.

So what does this mean for the high school athletes who are seeking to continue their careers at the next level? What factors should they consider when deciding what colleges to apply to. Except for those who are among, say, the top ten in the nation in their best event, who can pretty much go wherever they want to, there are several factors to consider. Let’s take a look at some of them:

Location
In-state tuition is going to cost a whole lot less than out-of-state tuition. If the assumption is that you’ll only receive a partial scholarship, then even a smaller percentage from an in-state school will lead to a lower tuition rate than a bigger percentage from an out-of-state school. I would argue that, for most track and field athletes, it makes more sense to stay in-state for this reason. Of course, there are going to be extenuating factors to consider, including the fact that the athlete may simply not want to live close to home, staying in-state is a very practical option.

Team Depth
In some cases, even if you have run very fast in high school and you have a clear idea of how much scholarship money you should receive based on your research of athletes from previous years, you might find that you can’t get as much as you want from the schools you have targeted simply because those schools already have good returning depth in your event. If you’re a male hurdler and you’ve run 14.2 in high school, and the college that you want to go to already has three returning hurdlers, they’ll probably offer you crumbs, at least for your first year, and may offer performance-based incentives to increase the scholarship amount in future years.

What Type of Atmosphere Would You be Entering?
When going on your visits, whether official or unofficial, that’s a key thing to observe and ask questions about. Particularly, you want to ask the current athletes on the team what the practice environment is like, what their relationships with their coaches are like, how often and how clearly the coaches communicate with them. You don’t want to enter a situation where most of the athletes are apathetic and dispirited. Nor do you want to enter a situation where the athletes don’t cheer for each other and support each other.

Academics Matter
The biggest mistake that any athlete can make is to choose a school based on athletics alone. The fact that scholarships are so scarce, and that the vast majority of athletes will not continue on to compete professionally, means that academics have to come first. Eligibility for academic scholarships can prove hugely beneficial in minimizing the costs of a college education. And gaining a college degree that can lead to establishing a non-athletic professional career still remains the number one reason to attend college at all.

Overall, because track and field is a non-revenue-producing sport that relies on revenue-producing sports for its continued existence on many college campuses, the hope that a track and field scholarship will be the vehicle to pay for a college education is largely unrealistic. It can help to fray the costs, and make it more affordable, but only the super-elite high school athletes can expect track and field to pay for their college education without the need to rely on any other sources.

Sources:

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