Exciting Opportunity for Talented Athletes or Potentially Harmful Shift?

Athletic Recruiting

You may be thinking that it would be a wonderful thing to have your child recruited to play their sport on a full athletic scholarship at a Division I university. Perhaps rightly so, and you would be in the company of a number of other parents. The student gets to play the sport they love, experience life in the limelight or the special bonds with teammates, have their education paid for, and perhaps also gain admission to a college to which admission may have been out of reach were they not recruited. However, where there is opportunity, there is competition. The current athletic recruiting trend in the U.S., especially at DI institutions, is to begin recruiting athletes, making offers and expecting verbal commitments as early as Grade 8, even though the NCAA recruiting rules expressly disallow this. While some coaches are reluctantly participating in this early athletic recruiting, they are in the position of having to compete with other institutions, which are doing so in order to snap up the best athletes. Most adults who counsel college-bound students would agree that this practice has the potential to be highly detrimental to these young athletes, as they are being asked to make important decisions prematurely.They are highly unlikely to be at the stage where they know what they want or need in a university, and will undergo significant physiological, emotional development in the time before beginning university years. In the end, are they going to be committed to a university that isn’t at all a good fit? As they learn and discover through their high school years, could they find that in the end, the university they’ve committed to doesn’t offer what they want to study?

So, as a parent, do you have your child pass up an opportunity that is offered at Grade 8 or 9? What I can advise, as you assess this decision, is to remember the fact that the NCAA rules are in place to protect the student-athlete from unfair recruiting practices and pressures – in this case, early recruiting, which benefits the institutions arguably far more than the student  

Also remember that there are many other scholarship opportunities available for students – roughly 7 times the number of academic scholarships from universities as there are athletic. And, ask yourself, while having the scholarship promised at this early stage gives a sense of relief financially, is there an added sense of pressure now on the student – to continue to play the sport throughout school regardless of any developmental changes that may come, or to maintain a certain level of academic performance?  If so, is that pressure positively or negatively influencing your son/daughter? Or do they have a sense of relief from the pressure of the college search, having a sense of completion and ability to simply focus on their high school academics, sports and just being a teenager? As always, the focus should be on observing the child, and following their lead in determining what is best for them in the end.