Third in a series
By CHUCK SOUDERS
Sports Writer
chuck_s@newsitem.com
No matter how they feel about redshirting, if there's one thing area administrators and athletic officials agree on, it's that parents who often cite the pursuit of athletic scholarship money as a reason to hold their children back a year, are woefully ignorant when it comes to scholarships.
"We have a lot of parents who think their kids are going to get a scholarship. They watch TV and think their kids are that good," said Shamokin Area Athletic Director Rick Kashner. "They see the money available, but they don't know what it takes, especially to be a Division I athlete."
But when push comes to shove, those same parents often aren't willing to do the grunt work.
"Rick and I put together a program down at Shamokin a couple of years ago where we had a person come in to talk to the parents and kids about scholarships, and what's available out there, and nobody came," said Mount Carmel Area athletic director Greg Sacavage.
"Parents are very uneducated about scholarships," said Southern Columbia athletic director and head football coach Jim Roth. "Our kids are pretty well educated about it because we talk to them about it. Football's a little different, but in a lot of sports, there's no such thing as a full scholarship, even at Division I. People don't realize how good you have to be, plus you have to meet certain parameters."
For example, a kid may be a very good football player at the high school level, and may be good enough to play at the Division I level. But college recruiters want players who are a certain size for a position, and have certain speed. If players don't fit that mold, it usually doesn't matter what they've done on the field. And that's even before they consider class performance, which is getting to be more of a must these days.
Too many parents are becoming enamored of their kids' abilities at the grade-school level and fail to take into account other factors, such as growth patterns and when they occur and burnout.
"It's interesting to watch kids," Sacavage said. "You never know what's going to happen. There are kids I watch on the (Mount Carmel) Jets and (Kulpmont) Cougars that are like monsters. Those kids are just pounding everybody, and then all of a sudden, the growth spurt stops and everybody catches up to them and they're not as good as everyone else.
"Then there's a kid who is a journeyman in junior high and then, all of a sudden, boom - they're bigger, stronger and better. It's hard when a parent gets the idea that they're going to hold their kid back, because it might be a good thing or it might be a bad thing," he added.
The Division I mentality hurts as well. Ned Sodrick, former superintendent at Shamokin Area and Line Mountain, spent many years as a middle school principal at Shamokin Area and had to deal with many parents who wanted to redshirt their children.
"They sit at home and watch Penn State on TV and think their child can play at that level, and very few can," Sodrick said.
Roth said too few parents take the time to take in games at the Division II or III level to see just how good the athletes at those schools are.
"Some people, if they went to a football game at Bloomsburg, could go down on the sideline for the pregame warmups and see the size and speed of those kids, and they'd realize how good you have to be to play at that level," he said.
Look at the stats
Line Mountain Superintendent David Campbell crunched some numbers when it came to football.
"There are about 115 Division I football schools. At 85 scholarships per team, that comes out to a total of 9,775 scholarships, for the whole country," Campbell said,
That works out to about 190 per state, and even though Pennsylvania, a prime football state, may get notably more than that, you also need to divide the number by four or five again, to get the number of scholarships given in any one year.
PIAA membership includes 774 senior high schools, probably of which between 500 and 600 offer football. That means that maybe one school in every eight gets a Division I football scholarship player in any one year, on average.
"When I was at South Williamsport, our football team played for the Class A title in 1993 and for the AA title in 1997, and not one of those kids was offered a Division I scholarship," Campbell said.
Most parents try
Wilkes University head football coach Frank Sheptock, a Mount Carmel Area graduate who went on to become a three-time Little All-American at Division II Bloomsburg and a member of the College Football Hall of Fame, said he actually thinks most parents try to do their homework, but admitted it's very tough to tell how good your child may be.
"It's very challenging for any parent to try to gauge where their son or daughter is at and where they can play at," Sheptock said. "Even here at Division III, we recruit the entire East Coast. I recently had a player in the office from Florida, and I was just talking to a kid from Ohio. What makes it tough is that you don't know how good the sport is in other areas.
"My daughters are playing basketball and soccer, and I don't have any idea what kind of talent there is in those sports in Delaware or New Jersey or Maryland," he said. "High school coaches are doing a better job of prepping families about what to expect. That helps a lot. Locally, the programs do a tremendous job. If Jim (Roth) has a I-AA (level) kid at Southern, he lets us speak to him just so the kid knows he has some options."
(Coming Wednesday: Funding options for scholastic sports could produce "a world of problems.")