It’s more and more competitive every year for football scholarships or grants. More high school students are looking for athletic scholarships as a means to play for college than before. Athletes area also becoming better educated to the proper way to get recruited to play college football. No longer can you sit on the couch and wait for a coach to call you. Athletes are starting earlier in the high school career preparing and laying the foundation for a scholarship.
1. Start early. Gone are the days of waiting until your senior season has ended and waiting for a couple of college coaches to contact you. Successful players are now starting in their sophomore and early in their junior year.
2. Attend summer camps and combines. By selecting the right camps and combines to attend you can go from high school athlete to college recruit in one day. Not all camps and combines are created equal so make sure you choose ones that will maximize your exposure and recruiting potential.
3. Get the best academic grades and test scores possible. Colleges keep raising the minimum that they will grant waivers for athletes. If you graduate with under a 3.0 GPA, you just shut the door on 50% of NCAA schools. It is never too late to increase your grades so make it a priority now.
4. Play multiple sports. College coaches like to see football players who excel in other sports like track, wrestling, lacrosse, baseball and basketball. Athletic diversity shows true raw athletic talent and can make up for minor deficiencies on the football field. Football is a sport where specialization does not matter as much as raw athletic talent.
5. Do it yourself. Handle the recruiting process yourself. This shows much more initiative than a player whose family pays a recruiting service to fax out online profiles and make a fancy highlight tape. College football coaches evaluate much more than your athletic ability. Determination and initiative show a lot towards whether the high school athlete will be a success in college.
What about tuition and books? Well, books are a joke most athletic departments keep libraries of used books that all the athletes have access to. Not to mention, they either have mandatory study times with free tutors where there are plenty of books and “practice tests”. So purchasing books is not a priority of a starting or back up linebacker for that matter. Tuition, now tuition is a little more difficult. The average public school with in state tuition is not that expensive so there are a number of ways to pay for this. Partial athletic scholarships along with academic and volunteer scholarships or grants can cover a majority of this. Tuition deferment also allows the student to delay the payment and use the funds from there “job” to pay for the rest. Private schools tuition is often six to ten times as much and is a completely different animal when it comes to athletic scholarships and football scholarships.
So as you can see not getting a full football scholarship is not the end of the world. If you are creative and intuitive enough to find other means they are definitely out there.
