34 The Sports Scholarships Insider’s Guide
Certainly, your athletic preparation and performance are
very important. You will not be recruited unless the recruiter/
coach feels that you can con-
tribute to the success of his/
her program. So, for the rest
of your high-school career,
you must seriously and with
the greatest amount of disci-
pline prepare yourself for col-
lege competition: both in the
classroom and in your sport.
Your academic credentials
will be just as important to
your successful recruitment
as your athletic credentials.
So this can’t be stated
forcefully enough: the authen-
tic value of a college athletic
scholarship is the opportunity
it provides its recipient to pre-
pare for a future of success
and fulfillment by acquiring a
college education.Reality Check
The hope, even the
expectation, that a high-
school athlete has of
becoming a professional ath-
lete must be tempered by the
foregoing statistics. Too many
prospects regard athletics as
the only path to achievement,
wealth, and fame. This is
particularly true of minority
prospects, as Harry Edwards,
author and a famous
counselor to minority student
athletes, notes as he writes
about this issue in the
Lexington Herald Leader,
“Big-name athletes who tell
black kids to ‘practice and
work hard and one day you
can be just like me’ are
playing games with the future
of black society... [African
Americans] have a principal
responsibility to understand
that sports must be pursued
intelligently and the [African
American’s] involvement in
sports is no game.”