 episode of In The Studio, I'm your host, Lynn Weaver. The program is brought to you by Davis Media Access and broadcasts on Davis Community Television, that's Comcast Channel 15, and AT&T Uverse, menu 99. We're also online and on YouTube. If you find us online at DCTV.davismedia.org. Today, we are going to find out a lot more about a topic which has been on the mind of a lot of young people here in Davis, namely sports in college. And to be able to discuss this topic, we have asked an expert, a college advisor, Jennifer Borenstein, to return to our program and to tell us more about playing sports in college. Welcome back, Jennifer. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, let's start right away from a very general, from a general point of view. What does it mean playing sports in college? It means different things. It does. There's different levels of involvement that a student athlete can choose. Probably what is most well known is playing for the college team. And if you decide to play your sport for the college team, there are essentially three different levels of involvement you can choose from. And the college itself is a part of that involvement, meaning there's different divisions. So for the NCAA, there are three divisions of play. The one that requires the most from the student athlete in terms of time commitment and ability and competitiveness is Division I sports. And many people follow Division I sports. Those are the schools that tend to be bigger, oftentimes public schools, with big budgets for their sports programs, schools like UCLA. Davis is now Division I, Stanford, USC, University of Washington. And so students who choose that route, what that means is that the sports become a predominant part of their college experience. They're spending a lot of time practicing, traveling to games. It's more of an intense competition and the level of play is at a higher level. So it really becomes more about having a sports experience in college than just your traditional college experience. Division I is also the division that has a lot of money to give. It has the most scholarship money. And so it's often the reason why students are attracted to that division is to try to get scholarship money. Or also they just like playing at that level. There are about 350 colleges in that division and about 170,000 students that play, student athletes, and 6,000 teams. So it's big. Down from that is Division II, which isn't as competitive and isn't necessarily as involved. So if you want to play at a certain level, but not make such a commitment, Division II can be a great option for many students. There's still scholarship money available, which is very nice. And it tends, though, to be schools that are more regional, not as well known nationally. Schools like UCSD, UC San Diego, a lot of the Cal States, Sonoma State, San Diego State, excuse me, not San Diego State. And then some of the schools that are private and back east. I don't have a lot of students necessarily that are attracted to those schools sometimes other than for the option to play sports. It's interesting. So I see a lot of Davis students either choosing Division I or sometimes Division III. Tell us about Division III. And Division III is oftentimes called the student athlete or scholar athlete league, because there are no scholarships available for athletic ability in that league. Tends to be the smaller schools, schools like the Claremont Colleges, some of the highly selective schools, MIT, Johns Hopkins. And there are seasons that are condensed with less travel time and less practice time. So students can focus more oftentimes on academics, not just athletics, hence the student athlete, scholar athlete league. So it allows for a little bit more of a balanced experience in college. Even though there are not scholarships for that, that division, it's often helpful for a student. If they play a sport and they want to play in college, it might help them get in. It might make options available for them. Yes. You know, if they play water polo and they're interested in going to the Claremont Colleges, it's worth it to reach out to the water polo coach there and see if they're looking for anybody and if you meet that criteria. One other thing I'll say about the student athlete league is it's the biggest. It has 440 colleges with close to 200,000 students playing. So a lot of students end up being happy in that arena. How would you say, how can you evaluate your ability as a junior or a senior in high school? And especially in not so much in team sports, but sports that require more of an individual skill. How can you go about, do you rely on your coach or tell us more about this? That's a great option. The first thing is to have that conversation with your coach about a reality check in essence. How do I measure up? And then because there are those different levels of play, there may be more options in one division versus another. Different schools have different records, let's say. So the really top seated schools, it might be more difficult to get a spot than others. So the first place is to go to your coach, your high school coach. But oftentimes there's more people you can kind of check in with. You can talk to if you're on a club team, your club coach. If you've ever participated in showcase tournaments or any sort of special camps for your sport, talking with some of the people there, scouts sometimes will come out. You can ask for evaluations from scouts. What I like to tell my students to do is to look at the college athletic program that they're interested in. Look at the players on the team and see if they can get any statistics on those players. So how fast are they? How big are they? You know what their record is like and see if you measure up. And if you don't measure up, that doesn't mean it's the end of the story. You know there are still many options to play sports in college and there's other pathways. So it's not it's not always discouraging. For division three, as you mentioned, could be a very good option for students who want to have a career, a later career in academia or in sorry, in academics or even academia, but also want to keep up their favorite sports. Exactly. Exactly. It's a great option. So students will look and say, oh, I can't play for this team. They're so big and so good, but there's so many other teams they may be able to play for. Plus outside of the NC2A, there's a whole different league. There's the NAIA. Yes. So there may be options in that league. There's about 260 colleges in that league, many smaller in terms of the number of students, 60,000, but colleges like Biola, Evergreen College, Cal Maritime. So there are options in that regard. Plus there's always the option to play intramural sports. There are many students that I know that like to go to college and maybe not have that much of a structured athletic requirement. And so intramural sports playing for fun is enough for them. That is great. Let me ask you, division one is the most competitive and requires the most skill or excellence in that sport. Do these students in your experience end up going to play professional sports? Very few of them. It's less than 1% an average. This is very interesting. Why is that? You know, it's just, I think that, well, there's injuries that can happen in college. They've been very much in the league. Yes, especially football and concussions. Soccer as well. Horror stories. Yes. So there's that, but I do think a big issue, and I don't have data on this necessarily. I know that there are very few that go on, but I think a big issue is burnout and time management. So you've been doing this all your life. You've been, you know, dedicating a huge portion of your time to this. You get to college and you realize the sacrifice you're making socially, possibly even academically. Maybe romantically. And maybe romantically, exactly. And so you start to have a broader perspective, but it is very hard to play professionally. Just the level of play and what's required. So I think it's a combination of those things that the skill set is that's required. I wasn't aware of that. So that's a very interesting. And it depends on the sport too. It depends on the sport. This is an average. We sort of, instantly I think I was thinking more of team sports, the baseball, the footballs, the basketball, the water polo, these things. I'm surprised. Well, and there aren't a lot of, if you're a water polo, there aren't a lot of post college options. You know, there's Olympics and whatnot. Baseball, sometimes people can bypass college altogether. Yes. The farm league. As we know. It's different. It's interesting. Many of the students I work with are not even looking that far. It's really about do I want to play in college or not. And I think that's a really important question for students to ask themselves. And it's not an easy question to answer necessarily. Especially at that stage, at this stage of high school and where you dream about sports and being excelling in sports. Now we touched on scholarships and so my question is how do you go about looking actively, looking to receive a scholarship? Yes. And that is such an important point. It is very important for students to actively look for scholarships. They don't just all of a sudden end up on your doorstep unless you're someone very unique and special. We've all heard stories about a ninth grader getting signed. And that can happen. But that's like one of, you know, one million. It's like winning the lottery. Yes. So it's important for students to market themselves. And that may seem uncomfortable. But here's what I tell students to do in that regard is put together an athletic resume. Generally a good time to be doing this is in the junior year. That's what I was thinking. That's what everything happens in high school. Yes, it's a busy time. The APs, the SATs and all that. I'm figuring out which colleges you want to apply to. So it is a lot. But there are some things you can do before that to help you market yourself. In ninth and tenth grade, it's a good idea to download the guide for college bound students on the NC2A website. It talks all about the recruiting process and the policies. It's a good thing to be familiar with. It's also a good idea before the junior year to do some unofficial visits to programs. Start learning what you like. Learn about your sport and what's required, what kind of scholarships are being offered. But once you get to the junior year, marketing yourself means letting coaches know about you. And in general, I tell students to try to touch base or reach out to about 30 to 50 different schools and their programs. Yes. Because in any given year, you don't know what a college program needs. You know, is it a defense position that they're looking for? Is it the goalie? Has there been a lot of turnover or not? So you're going to maximize your chance of getting offered something if you reach out to more. And when you reach out, what's good to have is that athletic resume, which is essentially like an academic resume, but it's focused on your athletic achievements. There's a lot of great templates online. And this is actually a book that I love. I just want to show this. Academic, athletic. Yes. So what this book does is it has timelines and examples of what that would look like. So if you're going to start putting that together, this is a great book for helping with that. A lot of students now put together a website that has their statistics and their highlights and also putting together a video. Yes. And speaking of websites, perhaps if we could display Jennifer's website. Yes. I have these resources on the website. Yes. And I must say that your website is extremely helpful. Thank you. I want it to be a resource. A lot of resources and links to other websites that are relevant. And in addition to this, if you do read the Davis Enterprise, Jennifer has a monthly column in the enterprise called the college column. That's right. And the reason I mentioned this is Jennifer does this so well. And I believe that she is passionate about helping students and helping their parents about the good choices they can make. Right. And the website is the right college. Yes. For you. Yes. Dot com. It's dot org. Or dot org. Sorry. And yes, we have it displayed there. So having said that, there's a good start to market yourself. And there is something very special about putting down your thoughts and your skills and your goals onto paper. So true. IE, a resume. Yes. And then, of course, you can always update it, enlarge it, enrich it, and so on. So that's a very good exercise. It is. And that's how you stay in touch with the coaches is you send out that resume, you follow up with them, invite them to any competitions you're going to be in, invite them to any sort of showcase tournaments. It's really on the student these days to reach out and make sure they're getting noticed and to stay in contact. What's interesting is the way the recruiting process works is you have to first make sure that you, as a student, go through the eligibility center website on the NC2A website. You pay $65 online, you put in your grades and the classes you've taken, and then coaches can start talking to you. Oh, I see. So you can market yourself to coaches, but until you reach a certain stage, I believe it's somewhere after your junior year, and until you've filled out that eligibility center information, coaches can't reach out to you. And we're speaking about the college coaches. The recruiting process, exactly. The recruiting processes. So because they see that, they go to the website, and they see your profile, and they will or not contact you. Yes. Oh, this is very interesting. It's an interesting point. Anything that comes to mind? Well, and then after your junior year, it really becomes like about a strategizing session. Yes. So you've marketed and then you want to strategize. So rather than applying to 30 or 50 schools because the workload would be onerous, I like to tell students to apply to about 20. In general, if you're not going to play sports in college, it is. But this is how you get a spot on a roster at a school you want to be at. I see. There's so many things to take into account when a student plays sports in college. It's not just whether the schools are right fit in terms of location and size of the school and academic programs, but it's who the coaches, who the other players are, how competitive the team is, is your position available, when will you get to start to play. So it's nice to have more than your typical number of schools you apply to, so you have some options and you want to see what they're offering you. Exactly. And that can vary quite a bit. Yes. The other thing is to start applying early. That's a really important message in terms of strategizing is because you're applying to so many schools, make sure you have your ducks in a row, standardized testing done. What about applying for early admission? Does it work in sports? It does work in sports. Where it becomes a little bit complicated and just like everything in this world, it's unfortunately pretty opaque, is students have to, or oftentimes the Division 1 and Division 2 schools participate in something called a national letter of intent. And what that is is it's a binding agreement, a written agreement between the student and the institution that the student will play at that school for one academic year in return for the financial aid award that's been offered. So the signing timeframe for that, generally it's in November for certain sports, football and basketball, I believe it's more in February. So if you're applying early to a school, that's helpful because you can know what's happening for signing. Yes. But sometimes you don't know or hear back in time for that November deadline. It gets a little complicated. It is very, very complicated. So certain schools will send out something called a likely to accept you letter. So the process gets complicated. The point is that yes, it's still an option, but you just want to try to keep your options open. So not to do anything that's binding, which would be early decision. Although I believe, and correct me if I'm long, that Ivy League schools don't bind you. It depends on the school. It depends on the school. It does. It depends on the school. Yes. Many... So make sure that you know what they're... Offering. Offering and what their rules are. Yes. Exactly. Yes. Although I mean it's not the end of the world if you get accepted and must go there, but it can be disappointing. It can be. Exactly. The big time that you can rescind that kind of agreement, if you've applied early decision to a school and gotten in, if the financial aid package isn't doable for you, then you have recourse to back out of that. I see. So it is binding with that caveat. With the caveat. How interesting. There are so many factors. There are. Let's talk a little more, if I may, talk about Davis. Yes. And can you, as far as your experience can tell us, what type... What is the profile of the sports bound students? Yeah. It's a real... That's such an interesting topic in my mind. I like looking at this from a sociological point of view sometimes. Yeah. There are a lot of very well-rounded students in Davis who are strong academically and strong athletically. Yes. And they've really learned time management skills. Yes. And they've specialized in their sport. Ooh. From an early age, they've been playing... I have a lot of soccer players, water polo players, swimmers, field hockey. Yes. Cheerleading. Not too many skiers, though. I do have a couple of skiers. You do? Skiers. Okay. And a snowboarder. And a snowboarder. Yes. I guess what happens is for some of these students is that they've been playing for so long, I'd say about 85% of the students that I work with that are athletes choose not to play sports in college on the college team. They're just ready to do intramurals and kind of put that part of their life aside because they've been doing it for so long. Many of them have injuries and have had surgery. And so for them, they kind of feel like I've had my run of the course. The ones that do decide to play in college, what I see, what the kind of similarities are that is they're looking to continue that sense of community and that sense of belonging. And I think it's very smart on their part that they recognize that that's something that's going to help them with the transition to college, is to have that school within a school feeling because you've got your team and the structure and the regimen that they've been doing this in particular, I think of some summers that I work with, will continue into college and that's kind of reassuring for them. Many students in Davis really do choose the D3, Division 3 route. I've had a couple interested in D2. I personally have not had anything work out with the D1 students, mostly because not a lot of Davis students are looking to play D1 or able to play D1, which is not a bad thing. There's no, I'm not placing any judgment on any of these. It's so important for the student to find what's right for them, what's going to help them be successful in college and that may not be sports at that level. And they're probably mindful, and I'm sure their parents are even more mindful of the fact that a sports career in a way, even though just at the student level, is very short lived. And then if they don't have another profession or another passion that they have developed in college, it's very difficult to find one afterwards. So true. And that's who students to really find a school that they like outside of the sport as well. That's right. So if you just go to a school because you like that athletic program, well, what if the coach leaves? Or what if you get injured and you're not playing? Yes. Then you're at a school that you have to say, do I want to still be here? And so that's another reason why it's so important to have a really good process of finding what's important to you, that right fit, so that you are applying to those schools. You can transfer if you go to a school. Yes. But there are some NC2A rules about that. So you may not be able to, if you transfer, play right away at the school, you transfer to. Yes. So something to keep in mind. It's an option, but there might be some trade-offs. So they are restrictive rules. Interesting. Now I wanted to move on to something that perhaps it's impossible to really talk about. I don't know. But what about students with disabilities? And I don't speak about learning disability, but physical disability because there are sports for those, that population. So do you know anything about it? I do. Yes. So the way that the policies work is that they're supposed to be equal opportunity, just like there will be equal opportunities. Of course. But there aren't. Just like Title IX. Exactly. Women and men and so on. Yes. So certain accommodations that can facilitate play. Do you have an example in mind? Yes. So like if someone is deaf, for example, and let's say they're running track and rather than having a, you know, a pistol, you know, find a different way to have a starting. Okay. That type of accommodation is, it should be paid. But there's no requirement to make accommodations necessarily. So it's a should in good faith. Yes. But does that always happen? Hard to know. It's a little bit of a gray area. There's a lot more focus on this topic. So there's many more development of intramural sports that are able for students with disabilities to participate. Any examples? Wheelchair basketball is starting up at a lot of schools. And that, can you explain that a little bit more? Wheelchair basketball? Oh, wheelchair. Yes. Wheelchair basketball. Yes. I misunderstood you. No problem. Yes. I thought chair basketball, I didn't know. That would be a fun sport, I bet. Something new. Yeah. So there are options. Yes. And the point is to not give up if that's something you as a student have a disability and you want to play is there are ways to make that work. And it's going to really depend on the school and the people at the school how to make that happen. So it is a sort of a benevolent or a voluntary rather thing. So let's recap a little bit. You should know what type of sports you want to play, whether it's division one, two, or three, or just intramural. Correct. And the first thing you should do is put a resume together. Yes. And talk to your coach to make sure that the coach can give you a candid assessment of your potential as well as your abilities at this time. And then maybe go to the website and post that profile so that sometime in the senior year, would you say, the coaches may contact you and also study the colleges that are attractive to you. That's very important. That's very important. I should have put that. And also perhaps research some of the rostrums in the colleges to find out whether the athletes at that college resemble your abilities, your physique, the type of sports, and also depends very much on what sport you are playing. That's right. And what else? So have a some understanding of the scholarship possibilities. Yes. So if you think that's going to be something that you need, recognize that even if you get a full scholarship in division one, it's not likely to cover the full cost of tuition, room and board, etc. However, financial aid is still available to you. Yes. And merit based aid. Yes. And I think a good sense of what your likelihood to play at college is helpful. So we may have talked about how if you're in football or basketball or soccer, excuse me, football, baseball or soccer in general, about 6% of high school students will play in college. Basketball is more like three. So know what the odds are in your sport. Yes. I, we're just about out of time. It's been so interesting and delightful. And I hope very helpful to students. One, one last question that comes to mind. The nature of sports in athletics is very competitive, even more so than in other fields. Do you find that the high school students that you have worked with are more competitive? I don't think it's difficult to really say, you know, in general, I think that they know how to manage the stress of being in a competitive environment better, but it's not always the case that inherently they're more competitive. It may absolutely. And I think the skills they learn from that are useful. I'll just say that we're out of time. Unfortunately, thank you so much, Jennifer, for returning to our show. Yes. And thank you all for watching. Now, if you'd like to watch this episode again, you can go to our website, dctv.davismedia.org, or you can find us on YouTube. And YouTube is also has the capability, if you wish, to download or share this episode from all of us here at Davis, Davis Media Access. Thank you so much for watching and see you next time.