Tuesday, March 18, 2008
- Ross Epstein
FLORIDA TENNIS
THE VOICE OF TENNIS IN FLORIDA FOR 17 YEARS
FEBRUARY 2008
HOW TO PLAY THE SCHOLARSHIP GAME
By ROSS GREENSTEIN
Nobody’s asking for sympathy. High school athletes have it pretty good on the surface of things: Popularity, adoring fans and a little taste of star treatment. But, while the light burns bright for those three or four years, few of them realize there’s an altogether different game that they’re playing – where they don’t even know the rules. That game starts when the phone won’t stop ringing, when strangers start showing up courtside with notepads and determined looks. Or they don’t.
Come senior year of high school, a tennis player has either made some headway in the sectional or national tournaments and they’re on the radar screens of coaches, or they have a lot of work to do quickly to get noticed and possibly still land a scholarship or roster spot.
The competition is intense, and its not an even playing field. In college tennis today, the coaches hold all the cards and the stakes are high. Ultimately the odds are pretty good that the coach may not even be around to see the student graduate because he will be fired or better coaching offer makes him move along. Or he may over commit scholarship places or roster spots as insurance for his program and then have to turn athletes away. These things happen- and athletes and their families need to be prepared.
Big money is at stake, too. A supportive family has probably already invested tens of thousands of dollars in their student-athlete. Coaching, off court training, entry and registration fees, equipment and tournament expenses. The list is long, but the expense doesn’t stop with high school. The cost will continue to escalate in college without a scholarship, but faced with the daunting process of finding the right school– and negotiating with coaches- many families feel like they’re about to play the market without a broker and hesitate.
Most end up chasing the same, small handful of scholarship places at the schools they’ve heard of, or worse still the schools with which their coach has connections. That’s incredibly limiting. What they don’t realize is that, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, there is $1 billion in scholarship money sitting waiting. It’s awarded annually in the US to more than 120,000 students. Plus there are more than 1,200 NCAA colleges at the D1, D2, and D3 level, and more than 500 Junior College and NAIA schools. In other words, thousands of programs that might offer a truer athletic, academic, and social fit for a student-athlete to succeed in their school and their sport. Or schools in which an athlete might be a bigger player, get more game time and have the ability to win a championship for their school.
The big problem in scoring a tennis scholarship is finding those places, figuring out which schools offer the right kinds of programs and which might actually help them help form the groundstrokes to landing a successful career. In the end, ironically enough, that comes down to education. Without it, athletes and their families can play the odds, but with only six percent of high school athletes advancing to the NCAA competition, those aren’t good.
Sports scholarships are like sports training. You have to have a goal and a well-defined plan. It needs to start in the freshman year of high school. By senior year, slots are already filling or filled. Athletes should short list the schools they are most interested in and send a well-written letter of interest to each as soon as possible.
By the senior year, they should be visiting schools aggressively and be a known entity to coaches who may well have visited their matches already. That all takes planning and commitment. It can be difficult, but a non-biased expert can be found- companies like Scholarship For Athletes help in letter preparation and in individually representing an athlete’s needs to coaches and their programs.
It’s also critical to choose a school that is the right fit academically in terms of entrance requirements and the depth and complexity of the syllabus, and socially. The campus environment is as important as the tennis at your school. Are the kids on campus going to fit the personality of a student-athlete? Is the size and location of the school a good fit for the athlete and family?
One thing is for sure: Without a healthy, robust tennis scholarship system in Florida and throughout the country, without young talent being matched with the environments where they can best develop academically as well as athletically, the future of tennis in this country has a huge question mark hanging over it.
Ross Greenstein is President and CEO of Scholarship For Athletes, an independent organization that represent high school athletes and their families in the scholarship search and negotiation process. He is a graduate of the University of Florida, where he played NCAA Division 1 tennis and made the SEC all-academic team. He is a former Minnesota State High School Tennis Champion.