No college with my sport

No college with my sport

For those of you following along with my program I first want to thank you for your support. Trying to change a culture is very difficult. Your support is truly appreciated.

There has been a new recent development in high school and club sports. Children are purposely choosing colleges to attend that do not have their sport.

That is right; a purposeful decision is being made to “Stop the Tsunami.” There can be no parental disappointment in the child if they are attending a college that does not have their “chosen” sport and they are not playing if the college offers the academics the child is interested in. They go to a college a good distance away so that the parents cant “pop in.”

I am talking about the 99% here, not the true DI athlete with multiple offers.

 Very few parents will push their children to pick a college that they don’t want to attend. When it does happen, we see the child go to that college for one year, still not play or play sparingly, and then transfer to a college that does not have their sport.

We have interviewed many of these parents and children and the disconnect between the child’s desires and the parents’ wishes offer a stark contrast. On one hand the child is so sick of having to play their sport year round that they see college as an opportunity to break the chain that binds them to their parents’ wishes. Some of the children say things to me like: “I don’t want to play anymore.”  “The college that I wanted didn’t have my sport.” “It wasn’t fun anymore.” And my favorite, “It never really was a priority of mine.”

Others went to a college that had their sport  and were so turned off at the prospect of doing this for another 4 years that they talked about the coach and the commitment being overwhelming and didn’t visit another college that had their sport.

On the other hand the majority of parents that I talked to were genuinely surprised by their children’s decision. Not that they were disappointed, they just didn’t see it coming. When I explained to them what their child was probably thinking, almost all of them, okay all of them said “now that you explain it to me, when we were visiting colleges our child was way more interested in the non athletic parts of the college.” Or something to that affect.

When I ran into the child or the parent a year later the stories were almost always the same. The child was relieved and the parent was now looking back with 20/20 vision and had the light go on!