Coaches and Scouts: The Ultimate Resources for Landing an Athletic Scholarship

If you are a student athlete hoping for a scholarship, one piece of advice that you will be told again and again is that you have to sell yourself. You will be told to use all of your various resources, especially coaches and scouts, to land that athletic scholarship. You will also be told that you have to compete as hard for it as for any home-run or three-point basket or touchdown you ever made. But this is not quite true.

The truth is, competing for a scholarship is probably harder than any of those things, and the payoff is as sweet as throwing a no-hitter or kicking the Super Bowl winning field goal. This is what the athletes themselves say.

Most athletes playing professional sports today say that by their early teens, even earlier sometimes, they had already decided what they were going to do before, during and after college. They were going to be in the NBA, the NFL, the major leagues. There were some things they were not quite sure about, though, and those revolved mostly around the subject of scholarships - the who, what, when, where, why and how of getting them. This is the subject you are researching now, and you probably already have a sense of how vast and complex a subject it is.

Although it’s not an easy task, there is a lot of help available. Reading articles like this one is a start, and using the same discipline that you used in your sports programs is the key to success.

So, from an early age, you’ve known you were, say, a top baseball player. You were always on the first string teams, you were a star in Little League, you had articles about you in the big city papers, you were ranked in national polls, all of that. As a 14- or 15-year-old, you were even recruited by high school teams (in those areas with open enrollment). Your parents were behind you 100 percent and you had decided long ago that college was a necessary step in the process.

By your junior year in high school, you should have started to get information on the appropriate college programs, assembled your letters of reference, made a scrapbook (and video) of highlights and awards, and collected the names, street and e-mail addresses, and phone numbers of coaches, scouts and admissions personnel. You will need to "work the phones" as well write lots of letters and e-mails in preparation for personal interviews and campus tours. There’s a lot to do in those junior and senior years.

First of all, be honest with yourself about what it’s going to take. You will be doing your schoolwork for your last two years in high school while you are doing two other full-time activities, namely, being a starter on your school’s team and selling yourself to the colleges you like. You will have to maintain a study regimen strong enough to keep your GPA at its highest, and keep attending every team practice and game, all while you are calling coaches and scouts all over the country.

The coaches and scouts are important to talk to, but more important to listen to. Even ones not affiliated with the schools on your “wish list” can give you valuable contacts, share vital information about other programs and point you in directions that you never even thought of. To make t he best use of these important resources, and to land that athletic scholarship that you’re working so hard for, you need to be focused, serious and well balanced. Don’t get manic about practice and overdo it, thereby injuring yourself. On the other hand, don’t stretch one rest day into three and go off your training regimen.

If you stay on your plan, follow your strategy and get help in the areas where you need it, you can keep all of your activities balanced - school, sports and the scholarship hunt. The ultimate resources for landing an athletic scholarship are coaches and scouts, but the one who has to juggle all the tasks, fill out the forms and ace the personal interviews is you. Stay focused, be consistent and work hard, and one day soon you could be starting a new career as a college athlete - on a full athletic scholarship!

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