Confessions of a Newtown Sports Parent

I recently asked a local sports mom why she had her young kids playing sports on a year-round basis. She didn’t miss a beat before responding.

“For fun!” she exclaimed.

That’s the answer I wanted to hear. That’s exactly the answer that any parent of a young child should give.

But time has a way of changing our perspective on things, especially where our kids are concerned.

Somewhere down the line, a friend or a coach might tell her in passing that her kid has talent, that she’s really good at dribbling or shooting or that he’s a talented blocker or tackler or passer…whatever.

And when that happens, the wheels might start turning upstairs. She might start thinking that there could be more to this whole sports thing besides it just being “fun.” 

Now, don’t say the "S" word too loudly. Someone might hear you say it and you're jinxed. Let’s just lightly breathe the "S" word like a butterfly kiss…scholarship.

There, I said it. The cat’s out of the bag and now the craziness can begin.

But - please don’t bet on a scholarship, please don’t plan on a scholarship. Don’t even THINK about athletic scholarships when your kid is eight, ten, even twelve or fourteen years old.  It’s dangerous. It warps your perspective and changes the motivations for playing the games in the first place.

Yet you hear people talk about it all the time. It’s amazing.

And it’s amazingly ignorant.

Scholarship money is out there, to be sure. But the best bets for getting non-loaned financial aid for college are primarily based on academics and community service. Sports can certainly help a kid get into a better school than their grades might indicate, but so can being a really good tuba player. Good athletes with good grades can get more of the financial aid that schools make available outside the athletic department, especially in Division III where there technically aren’t any athletic scholarships.

But the harsh reality of the “full ride” athletic scholarship is that there simply aren’t that many of them. Ask 99.9% of the Newtown High School athletes (and their parents) who go on to play college sports and listen to what they tell you.

It’s a story about dreams that very rarely come true. Even in those cases where it all worked out, a scholarship to a D1 school comes with responsibilities that create a great deal of stress for the student-athlete.

The reality is that being a Division I athlete is a full-time job. There literally is no off-season. A full class load, 6am workouts, 3pm practices and a variety of work-study jobs is a brutal schedule, one that most “regular students” just don’t have to deal with. It’s a totally unique - and not always fun - college experience.

The number of full scholarships that an NCAA Division I school is allowed to offer varies from sport to sport. Football has the most – they get 85 full rides per team. Other sports are allowed to break the scholarships up into “fractionals”, so where lacrosse gets 12 full scholarships, they can offer a “half ride” or even a “third.”

Hey, have you seen these tuitions? Every little bit helps.

After football, Title IX evens things up by giving women’s sports significantly more full rides than the other sports. In Division II, the ratios are similar. There are 32 full rides for football and all the sports are playing catch-up after that.

But when you realize that those scholarships are spread out across four or even five classes of students (“redshirts” have made the five year program standard), the competition for athletic scholarship money available to incoming freshmen is intense.

So if you’re counting on your son getting a “full ride,” then you should sign him up for football as soon as he can walk. But then, you will likely also need him to grow into a freakishly large 18-year-old or become the fastest kid with the strongest arm and the quickest feet in the state, because as I check college rosters, Connecticut isn’t pumping out too many top-quality D1 football players.

And if you have dreams of your daughter getting a scholarship, you should keep her playing whatever she’s playing, preferably one of the more obscure sports where the law of averages are more in her favor.

Oh, and hope that she's really great at it. That would help, too.

The U.S. Department of Education figures indicate that, nationally, out of 100 ninth graders, only 68 will graduate from high school, only 40 will enter college directly, only 27 are still enrolled in college in their second year, and only 18 will graduate
from college.

But no matter what kind of attrition there is, maybe the better percentage play is to keep your kids focused on where it all started, both for you and for them.

Remember? It was supposed to be all about having fun.

If your youth sports kid is athletic enough and still has fun playing the games, then he or she will want to keep on playing the games in high school. And if they are talented enough to keep on playing in college - on an NCAA team, for a club team, in intramurals, whatever - they can stay part of that team environment and make friends and have new, and hopefully FUN, experiences.

And then it was all worth it. Even if it ended up being free.