Dreams and reality can be a world apart. Unless, as a high school student, you have already achieved a strong reputation in football, basketball, baseball, ice hockey, soccer, golf, or tennis, your chances of turning pro are slim. In fact, even if you have earned national recognition, your chances of having a career as a professional athlete are not good; the competition at the top is that tough. If you have the drive and ability and enough luck to become a pro, we don't want to discourage you. You owe it to yourself, however, to approach your goals intelligently, with your eyes open to the realities of professional athletics.
For each pro sport, a few colleges seem to provide an unusually large proportion of successful pro athletes. In this chapter, we will show you, which are the most likely "launching pad" colleges in your sport. But please don't assume that we mean for you to consider this as the major factor in selecting one school over others. There are far more important reasons that should go into your choice of a college. However, if your goal is to be a professional athlete, it is something that should enter into your decision.
The Smaller the School, the Longer Your Odds of Turning Pro
We should make one more point about the likelihood of going from college to professional status in team sports. This has to do with the overwhelming tendency for future pro athletes to come from the larger, more high-powered college athletic programs. Why are players from smaller colleges that are little known for their athletic performance relatively rare in professional team sports? There are excellent athletes at all levels of college competition, just as there are excellent coaches at all levels. The difference is in the greater number of excellent athletes at schools that tend to produce top-flight teams. At schools with high-powered athletic reputations, a greater number of highly talented players push and test each other daily in practice. This constant challenge helps them to develop even further, while it eliminates those players lacking an extremely high level of drive and ability. This proving-ground atmosphere on the best college teams is an important reason that professional scouts look primarily to these schools for the bulk of their future talent.
COMPARING "REWARDS" AMONG PRO SPORTS
Before leaving the topic of careers in professional sports, let's take a quick look at the average length of careers and the amount of compensation one might expect as a pro athlete. Players' salaries in professional team sports are negotiated by the individual players and their agents. Each sport has a form of union known as a players association, which works to establish a minimum or base salary below which no player on a major league roster can be paid. These agreements for minimum wage and other matters last for a few years and are then renegotiated (sometimes, as with unions in other job fields, at the risk of a workers' strike if no agreement is reached before the old contract ends).
Remember that the minimum salary figures for each sport change frequently, as players' union contracts expire and are revised. For example, the contract agreed upon between the NFL Players Association and the league owners in 1982 raised the minimum wage for any full time player to $40,000. The average salary in each sport tends to vary according to playing position. In football, for example, the average salary for quarterbacks and running backs is considerably higher than for kickers. Centers in basketball tend to earn more than forwards and guards. And in baseball, although the game revolves around pitching, the salaries of pitchers tend to be lower, since pitchers play in rotation and only appear in about one of every four of their team's games.
Golfers and tennis players usually have what are called performance contracts, which link their names to a particular club (e.g., Brian Gottfried "plays for" Bonaventure, FL; Roscoe Tanner "plays for" Hilton Head, SC). But as a form of compensation, all these contracts do is to provide a home base for the players and generally also pay for their travelling expenses. The real earning power of professional golfers and tennis players comes from the money they make by competing successfully in tournaments. The more tournaments they enter, the more chance they have to earn money.
Using 1981 tour earnings as a means of comparison, the chart below shows how men and women golfers and men and women tennis players measure up to each other in earning power.
Since these figures were compiled, both Ivan Lendl in men's tennis and Martina Navratilova in women's tennis have earned well above $ 1-million during a single season's tournament play. More players are likely to follow, although top professional tennis players and golfers may be nearing the limit in their earning power.
Upon announcing his retirement in 1983, Bjorn Borg was estimated to have earned over $50-million directly or indirectly from tennis. More of that amount came from product endorsements and earnings from unofficial tennis competition than from official tour earnings. Of course, professional team sport athletes also often make considerable additional income from product endorsements and personal appearances.
The average yearly salary among all 276 National Basketball Association players exceeded $200,000 in 1981, yet only 14 professional male golfers made over $200,000 in that year. Another 38 earned between $100,000 and $200,000. Still sound pretty good? Eighty-seven male golfers (nearly one-third of the players listed in the TPA Tour Book) made less than $10,000 for their full year's tournament earnings. And there were hundreds more "rabbits" (marginal pros who must play qualifying tournaments each week to get into the main tournaments) struggling to make a living at their sport. Their earnings, like those of the hundreds of tennis players who struggle through early week elimination tournaments for a handful of positions in the real tournaments (the ones reported in newspapers), remain uncharted simply because they make so little money for their efforts.
WHAT IF YOU ARE UNSURE OF YOUR PRO POTENTIAL?
Many college-bound athletes simply don't know whether or not they have a chance to become professional athletes. They may hope to turn pro, but they don't yet know enough about their ability compared to others to make a realistic assessment of their chances. In selecting a college or transferring from one school to another, consider which of the following situations comes closest to your own, and make your decision accordingly. Of course, you must also include academic, economic, family, and other factors in making your choice.
- If you want to be a professional athlete and feel strongly that you have that potential, lean toward enrolling at a school that appears to be a launching pad to the pros. Your risk is in not making the team because of stiff competition, or being only a substitute. Weigh this against the benefits of training and competing in a pre-professional sports atmosphere. If you seriously want to become a pro, challenge yourself with the toughest collegiate competition you can get, which may be within your own team.
- If you feel you may have professional potential, but playing as a starter on a highly competitive team is your first priority, then consider Division I colleges that may have good records yet don't appear on the list of launching-pad schools in your sport.
- If you doubt that you have potential and are not even particularly interested in a professional sports career, consider colleges that play at any level of competition, but especially those whose representatives do not try to sell you on the fact that they have one or more former players who became professional athletes. The image of both the team and the athletic program that you receive from the school's representatives during recruiting is a good indicator of the team environment.
- If you feel you simply haven't had enough experience to make judgments about either your ability or your interest in a professional sports career, consider colleges with athletic programs that are less rather than more competitive. By doing so, you'll get more playing experience (and just plain fun) from college athletics, and you will reduce the risk of getting lost among players with better reputations. If you determine after a year or two that you are a much better athlete than you initially thought and that a career in professional sports is what you want, transferring to a launching-pad school is an option you can then consider.
Some coaches try to sell their program to recruits by claiming that they send players into the pro ranks. Whether or not they actually produce future pros-and whether this occurs regularly or only occasionally-coaches who have this orientation sometimes create an atmosphere of drudgery among their players. To be good at a sport, of course, you have to work at it. And hard work in the right atmosphere can be enjoyable. But some pro-oriented coaches get so serious about their "mission" that the team loses out on the enjoyment of sports, and what was supposed to be fun instead becomes a chore. The coach's attitude toward the sport and how he or she treats athletes are good topics to discuss with other students when you visit a campus.
If college athletics is the highest level of competition you expect to experience, then you should strongly consider programs where you will have a reasonable chance of getting to compete rather than those in which you will spend your energy fighting for a spot on the bench. While there is some pleasure in being around future pros, it wears thin, especially if it comes at the expense of your college playing career.
This again raises the age-old question of whether it's best to be a small fish in a big pond or a big fish in a small pond, a question we all have to answer for ourselves. Just remember that, in sports, you may not get into the water at all, if you don't choose your pond wisely.