Playing in college is a dream for a lot of young athletes.  And now it has turned into this big hoopla.  Signing day is huge.  You see kids on TV.  Schools have special assemblies for it now.  We all know the reasons athletes want to play in college, but there are some numbers you need to look at before you decide if this is for you.

The reality is that playing in college only happens to a select few.  You have to be a pretty good athlete to play even at the D3 level.  If you are one of the lucky ones to play in college, kudos for you, but let’s take a look at a few of these numbers.

The NCAA has stats on the percentage of high school athletes that will move on and play in college.  It has it for all the sports.  If you click here, you will see at their site that a sport like baseball has 482,629 high school athletes playing the game, but only 6.9% will play in college.

Football has over a million high school athletes, but only around 6.5% will play in college.  That percentage is the combined number of D1, D2, and D3 athletes.

But, those aren’t the numbers I wanted you to see.  The numbers I wanted to see was with my athletes and not only how many played at the different levels, but how many stuck it out for all four years of college.

I went through my database and only looked at the athletes I had that started training with me before they went to college.  So, athletes that already were in college or playing in the pros did not count.

Throughout the years, I’ve been a strength coach at junior colleges and the high school level.  I did not want to count those athletes because there were a bunch of them.  I only looked at the athletes that actually paid for my services themselves.

Here are the numbers I came up with:

  • I had a final tally of 772 athletes that I had worked with in a span of 12 years that fit the above parameters.
  • 89 of those athletes played sports in college.  That is a percentage of 12% of the athletes we worked with played in college.
  • 33 of those athletes are currently playing their sport.  Of those 33, 20 play D1, 1 plays D2, 11 play D3, and 1 plays for a community college.
  • Out of the remaining 56 athletes that played college, 21 quit their sport during college.  That means 38% of those athletes decided playing a sport in college wasn’t for them.
  • 35 of those 56 athletes did play the sport they went to college for their entire college career.  
  • Out of all the athletes, 54 did D1 sports, 2 played D2, 32 were at the D3 level, and 1 was at a community college.

One thing to notice is just because these athletes played a D1 sport doesn’t necessarily mean they received a scholarship.  There were some walk-ons.  Also, these D1 schools were all over the place.  Small D1 and big D1 programs.  So opportunities are there.

Why did 38% of the athletes decide to quit?

Injuries were one reason.  Lost the desire.  It wasn’t what they thought it would be.  There were just better athletes playing and they couldn’t compete.

Let’s look back at the sample numbers I gave you from the NCAA and their percentages for kids moving on to play college sports.  You will notice that the percentage I have for my athletes is a little bit higher than what the NCAA provides.  I think the biggest reason for that is we work with athletes that want to get better (they sought us out).  So naturally, they might have that inner drive to do what it takes to play collegiately.  Mix that with talent and you get a determined athlete.

It still is a small number.  You need to realize that college sports is a whole different ballgame then high school sports.  It can be fun, but the athletes are better and your role might change.

Make sure you are happy with your decision if you are able to play collegiately.  If we are working with 100 athletes this winter then roughly 12 of those athletes will have a chance to play in college.  Will you be one of them?