Realism about athletic scholarships

Families who groom their children to compete for a collegiate athletic scholarship should be aware of the risks, which this article and this article explain:

1. Expecting that participation in high-level youth sports is the path to a lucrative athletic scholarship, parents can spend $5,000 to $10,000 a year taking their child to compete in elite, year-round tournaments, money that could have been saved for college tuition.
2. Only about 2% of high school athletes receive NCAA athletic scholarships annually. In other words, a student has a statistically better chance of getting admitted to Harvard, Yale, or Stanford than of getting a sports scholarship.
3. Most athletic scholarships cover less than what it costs to attend the school, often much less.
4. To maintain a scholarship, the typical NCAA athlete spends over thirty hours a week in season training for his or her sport. That means less time to study, rest, make friends outside the team, join non-athletic organizations on campus, and even pursue summer internships, as most sports require year-round training.
5. All this training invites serious athletic-related injuries. Another article explains how the athlete's family, not the college or the NCAA, pays the medical expenses resulting from the injuries. If they permanently sideline the athlete, the school can revoke the scholarship. 

Here is a less stressful way get a scholarship and still play sports in college. Don’t take the child to tournaments every weekend. Take the kid to the library. Many colleges offer merit scholarships, essentially tuition discounts, for students with high grades and standardized test scores. Many of these schools have fine NCAA Division III teams, which typically demand significantly fewer hours per week for practices and competitions than scholarship-granting programs require.

This article explores the advantages of playing sports at an NCAA Division III school.