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How Will COVID-19 Affect Scholarships For Future Collegiate Athletes?


COVID-19 has had a devastating effect on life. All life. It has now disappointed hopeful teenagers attempting to further their education the only way they can afford — through scholarship. Athletic scholarships, already taking a loss from lack of financial support and closed programs, have been COVID’s latest victim. Money has been simply depleted.

If you haven’t received a commitment letter from your school of choice, chances are you won’t. At unprecedented rates, teenagers are opting to redshirt a year in high school to preserve their eligibility status instead of opting to go to a community college. Others are rolling the dice and staying the course, in hopes that life in sports will resume by the time their commitment contract is up for renewal. Many have a bleak outlook on the turnaround in the collegiate scholarship process for entering high school students through 10th grade.

With extremely small numbers already, the fewer than 2% of high school student-athletes that are offered athletic scholarships will dwindle. 

With lack of funding, certain athletic programs were terminated. Terminating physical programs of lesser-funded measures like baseball, lacrosse and soccer, student-athletes are concerned about their lack of exposure and limited recruitment efforts they’ve been introduced to. 

If you have talent, the money is presumably there. Athletic programs like football and basketball have a considerable amount of financial reserves due to the diversity in generating sources. At top colleges and universities, the two top performing sports — men's basketball and football — retain boosters, TV deals and other financial resources in order to explore, attract and recruit top athletes to its programs. The new fear, however, is that potential recruits won't be seen by top scouts for both minor league and collegiate teams. As always, scholarship athletic hopefuls should be proactive in their visibility to scouts. The traditional way of scouting prospects has shifted, and the shift started long before COVID-19.

Major League Baseball's major news has potentially backlogged hundreds of candidates that would funnel through the traditional recruitment system. When news hit of the new MLB Draft League's inaugural season launching in 2021, it left scouts, players and fans with a lot of questions. As a result, MLB's decision to cut about twenty minor league teams, in lieu of partnering with the rising independent leagues throughout the country, will potentially trickle down, affecting college hopefuls five to six years out. 

According to some sources, COVID-19 has accelerated something already happening in baseball recruiting efforts: the expansion of video/technology resources to recruit top prospects. The downside of these video productions? No negative film is part of the submission due to editing. Just as models’ blemishes and dimples are photoshoppedout to create the perfect, unattainable images we see as we flip through high fashion magazines, no one will send a video to a scout that has them striking out, missing plays or throwing up bricks. The video will simply be skewed to highlight the most enticing performances.

Furthermore, scouts look for more than just pure ability. They also consider sportsmanship, showmanship, and receptiveness to coaching. Traditional showcases, similar to a combine, had been the way to examine a player’s full potential. Now, virtual showcases are the thing. Allowing for a full examination of the ability of the players, it’s the next best thing to in-person showcases in light of the restrictions COVID-19 has brought to the world. It is the technology industry that will keep foreign recruiting from the Dominican Republic to Japan to Africa possible, as travel logistics are questionable in 2021. 

Ultimately, sports programs — with the exception of men’s basketball and football — are feeling the blow of the shutdown. Programs along with scholarship hopefuls are dwindling to non-existent in many cases. Those with talent will rise, but those who don’t play the two most popular sports will have to search for alternative ways to be seen and get school funding. With this blow, and the rise of businesses such as Google now waiving formal schooling requirements to work for them, it makes you wonder what will become of those who would have gone to traditional school through scholarship, and opt out to either pursue their athletics professionally, or go to a trade school to enter the workforce sooner than later.

The financial burden on parents and kids coming out of college without a secure or optimistic outlook on the economic future seems less worthy of the cost of a piece of paper. It’s been twenty years since I graduated from college, and though I am one of few actually doing a portion of work that I studied in college, far too many of my classmates are not. Even still, if I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have opted out of formal education. I would have licensed straight out of high school and been further along. But as the late gospel artist (and Louisiana governor) Jimmie Davis penned, “I wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now.”

Danita Harris (@danitamharris) is managing partner and CEO of GUICE Wealth Management, a boutique firm catering to the sports and entertainment industry.