Just Like Climbing the Stairs: How to Get an Athletic Scholarship

There are far more high school athletes who need scholarships than there are scholarships to award. When student-athletes start thinking, hopefully during their junior year or even earlier, about how to get an athletic scholarship, it is vitally important that they don’t just “do their homework” - they need to go for extra credit and do the very best research on the subject that they can do.

First, of course, it is necessary for students to be completely honest with themselves about their athletic ability if they are thinking about getting a full athletic scholarship. This is, of course, the hardest kind to get. The fact is, they don’t just need to be the best point guard on the school basketball team or best wide receiver on the football team to be competitive. They need to be the best in their city or county, even, and among the best in the state.

Student athletes will know by their junior year how good they are in comparison to the local talent, and if they aren’t one of the top few in each sport, they need to alter their scholarship strategy. Capable athletes can still get financial assistance for college based on sports performance, but they may have to put together a package of smaller grants and awards if they can’t get a single athletic scholarship for the whole amount.

There are some tried and true strategies that will help football players who are not the next Jerry Rice, and baseball players who are not the next Barry Bonds, pay for college. If that describes you, then do the following:

1. Just as the star players do, assemble a scrapbook (that you can make copies of) highlighting your athletic achievements, school activities, academic performance, community involvement, etc.
2. Put a mailing list together (e-mail and postal addresses) and stay in touch with the school programs in which you are interested.
3. Make a video or DVD movie of your game play, practice sessions, skills exercises and other athletic performances.
4. Get in touch with people who have been on the school teams that you are interested in, to get the inside stories and any helpful hints.
5. Find out about the various teams’ coaches, from assistants up to head coach, and about the funding of the sport and its scholarships.

You need to discover, or at least estimate, where your skills would place you on the teams’ “depth charts” and how much scholarship money would correspond with your position. Your challenge is to help the sports program by coming to them with as large a financial aid and academic scholarship package as possible, so that you can help the team and the coaches “stretch their budget” - which will increase your chance of making the team.

Some guidance counselors and fee-based scholarship “brokers” use the terminology “playing the game” to describe the process of figuring out precisely how you will get an athletic scholarship. This is a common way of expressing how people achieve goals in life - but might not be the best way to describe the scholarship search process, despite its being a sports metaphor and all.

A better way to characterize how you should work to get an athletic scholarship is to say that it is "just like climbing the stairs." Taking one step at a time, with sufficient care and planning, you can work your way all the way up from your junior year in high school to the point where you are entering college with a place on the team. And the best part is that someone else will be paying for all it.

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