Tag Archives: athletic scholarship

Here’s Why You Suck!

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What does it take to be an athlete?

High school athletics has become a year-round sport with constant training, skill development and athletic competition.  The purpose for all this is to ultimately earn an athletic scholarship.  If you do not put in year-round training to become a superior athlete in your sport you have no chance to earn an athletic scholarship.

Many student athletes believe that they do not have to put the necessary time in to get better therefore, they will under-achieve and receive no scholarship offers.

There are many student athletes that truly suck at their sport and oftentimes they are left wondering why no one is recruiting them or why they did not get any scholarship offers.

An athletic scholarship is a privilege, given only to those athletes who have superior athletic and academic talents. Just remember that there are only so many scholarships per sport to give out in any particular year any way.  Student athletes: how many hours are you going to spend in the weight room to gain muscle and strength? How many hours will you put into individual development of your overall game? When the other athlete is up before the sun rises running miles to get better, will you still be sleep? Will you still be just getting out of bed? Will you still be looking for your running shoes or will this be another long list of excuses on why you can’t workout today?

There are high school student athletes who have very little God-given natural talent but, with an incredible work ethic to their sport they somehow over-achieve to get that full athletic scholarship offer. These athletes sometimes get overlooked because they are not very flashy but they still get the job done.  Those athletes do not have superior skills athletically but work 10 times harder than the athlete with superior talent and skill. 

Student athletes who spends all of their time developing their athletic skills generally are the ones who succeed all through high school, through college and somehow manages to get a professional contract.

I have seen many athletes with great talent athletically, but put very little work into getting better.  I have known many of the superior athletes who have reached the highest level that they could reach in their sport but because of their unwillingness to work on their game, they did not stay at the highest level of their sport very long.  Those incredibly talented athletes believe that their athletic greatness would somehow sustain them forever.  What they did not realize is that everyone at the highest level works on their game every single day so they can stay there at that high level.

The game changes from practice to actually playing in the game.  There are those players that look incredibly good in practice, who can do all the drills and who can totally dominate but when the lights are turned on and there’s actually people there to watch them play, those players end up fading out, cracking under the pressure and disappearing totally. 

The reason for this is because they did not put the extra time in to develop their confidence; they did not put the extra time in to develop their athletic talents.  When it became game time, they realized mentally that they were not ready.

When I was in college at West VirginiaState, all the players on the basketball team were good. Even though I had talent and was 7 feet tall I felt I wasn’t good enough.  What I did was find every sort of way to get better.

I would jump rope in the evenings after I studied for the day. On the weekends if we didn’t have practice I would run on the track or run the stadium stairs at the football field.  I would get in the weight room and lift weights, I was looking for ways so I could keep up with all of the superior talent we had on my college basketball team.  I just went out there and worked very hard every single day and I did not make any excuses.  For me it was about the challenge, wondering if I could compete with all of these great players? So I stepped up and faced the challenges head on.

For me personally, it was a daunting task but through it all I kept working hard, I did not give up and most importantly, I did not quit.  Many of my college teammates could not handle the day to day pressures of being a college athlete. The weaker ball players crumbled under the pressure and ultimately quit the team.  I’m sure no matter what they did throughout their lives they were always a quitter.

The reason so many athletes suck is because of their unwillingness to push themselves athletically, farther than they’ve ever been pushed in their entire lives.

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You’re not going to get an athletic scholarship because you suck

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Reality is extremely hard to deal with if you’re a high school student athlete and all you’ve ever wanted was a college scholarship.  The truth is you’re not gonna get one because you suck.  College coaches are only interested in players who can help their program win games.  If you do not have talent to play at the college level it is nobody’s fault but your own.

It would be like trying to get a recording contract; I can’t sing a song no matter how hard I try and no matter how much practice I put into it I will always suck so, there’s goes my recording contract.

There are student athletes who work extremely hard but still suck at playing their sport. I know it’s the dream for many student athletes to play college ball but if you’re on a team that sucks you have no chance, if your coach sucks you really have no chance and if you suck then what’s the point of even trying.

Many years ago when I was getting started as a college recruiter I use to go to a lot of basketball summer camps. This one camp in particular had about 1,000 basketball players there.  I would say 99.9% of those ballplayers there had absolutely no chance of playing basketball in college.  There were only a handful of players that had a chance of playing Division 2 basketball but the rest of those players really sucked at basketball. Maybe they played other sports like baseball or football and there were some players who had some height but no talent to play anywhere.

College coaches only want student athletes who have talent, who can help their programs win. We already know this but it does not stop all the student athletes who suck at sports from trying to reach college coaches.

One thing is true; there are a lot of high school players who are extremely talented but are invisible to college recruiters.  Those players who have the talent and are very good students still slip through the cracks of the recruiting process every year.  There’s always a story or two about ballplayers who end up not being recruited for college.  Being under-recruited for college has been going on with players for a very long time.

There’ll be a small town high school star athlete who is very good but because he plays ball for a very small school nobody’s paying attention to him.

I do believe you can make yourself into a better athlete if you have something to work with.  You have to have some level of athletic ability somewhere in your body, that would be the starting point to developing your athletic skills and talent.

There are athletes out there who do not possess any level of athletic talent but they still believe that college athletics is in their future because they work extremely hard.  Even though they put in hours on top of hours of practice at the end of the week, the results are still the same; they still suck.

I see those parents who are out there investing big dollars into their children’s athletic future and that’s great.

A sport is an excellent extra curricular activity. The problem happens when it’s time to play on a team. The problem after that is when there are expectations for your children.

The problem becomes bigger when your child does not develop athletically.

The problem gets worse when parents keep putting money in it thinking it will help improve their child’s athletic ability.

It becomes a deeper problem for parents when they believe it is somebody else’s fault as to why their child has not developed athletically.

The blame game begins when the parents start to point fingers at some youth league coach for not coaching up their child.

The parents become crazy when another child shows a little bit more athletic ability than their child.

Major issues begin to take place between parents, coaches and anyone else who just happens to be there.  I’ve seen this scenario played out for years and parents become extremely pissed off because of the amount of money they have invested with very little return on the child’s athletic improvements.

It is extremely hard sometimes for parents to accept the fact that their child, whom they love so much, sucks at sports.

Final thoughts: There is a large list of high school student athletes who suck at playing their sport.  These athletes do try to give their best every day but the reality is, they suck.  These kids will have their parents spend money believing it will improve their athletic standing but it will not help them. Today’s generation of student athletes are a little bit softer; they’re not hardcore like they used to be.  The bottom line is, there are a lot of ballplayers who really suck and they need to get out the way of the players who can play.

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