Just my luck: Student athletes use skills to pay for college
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August 30, 2010 • Madeline Hill and Ellen Hughes
Filed under Student Life
There are 451,000 boys that play baseball, but only 12,272 of them are offered an athletic scholarship. For basketball it’s even lower. 7,545 receive a scholarship leaving 532,455 players (and counting) with no chance at all.
The competitiveness of snagging a scholarship increases with every year, but now there are new ways of distinguishing top athletes.
“It has changed tremendously,” Carter Wilson, Athletic Director at Decatur said. “Now [receiving a scholarship] is about showcases where athletes go to places where coaches are going to be as opposed to coaches coming to Decatur High School to find one athlete. They don’t do that anymore.”
Instead of going on YouTube to find the next Lebron James, coaches and scouts used to physically travel from high school to high school to expose the next star. Michael Carvell, a writer for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, covers high school sports and said that the ways of recruiting in the past are gone. “Almost everything will be performed through the Internet, with players posting videos for colleges to see,” Carvell said.
Before becoming an athletic director, Wilson was a college scout who searched for top athletes at schools across the state of Georgia. Now, Wilson said it’s about marketing yourself. “There’s got to be a video,” Wilson said. “There’s got to be some way to put you and your skill set in front of coaches.”
Organizations like the National Scouting Report (NSR) help athletes by editing their videos and sending them out to over 1,300 colleges across the country.
Senior Nic Wilson and juniorTrumon Jefferson try to use their talents to join the elite crowd of college athletes.
Senior hits home
He always wears a braided necklace, which is common among baseball players. He jingles the gym keys back and forth. Nic Wilson is the son of Athletic Director Carter Wilson, and plays both baseball and basketball. Wilson wanted to pursue baseball and recently began thinking seriously about a scholarship.
“I really wasn’t looking for a scholarship before this year because I figured that I would graduate in 2010 … It kind of crept up on me,” Wilson said.
He has attended many showcases, including one in January called the Under Armour National Showcase in Arizona.
“I flew out of Atlanta on Friday morning to spend the day in Tucson [Arizona] trying to get acclimated with the area. Then Saturday morning we had a showcase … for the skil
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