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The way Brandon Sizemore figured it, his basketball career had come to a near-perfect, albeit unwanted, ending.

The recent Newport graduate, a scrappy sparkplug on an overachieving team, had helped the Wildcats to an improbable run to the state tournament at Rupp Arena.

But he was 5 feet 9 and the squad’s sixth-leading scorer. His name wasn’t on recruiting watch lists, and college coaches hadn’t come to see his games. “I thought that was it,” Sizemore said. “Then this kind of popped up.”

Sizemore will attend NAIA Georgetown College in the fall on a partial basketball scholarship. He’ll face an uphill climb for varsity playing time on a huge roster that features several former NCAA Division I players.

And he’s not alone. Every year, small colleges add more roster space on more athletic teams to attract more students and more tuition money to their campuses. As a result, high school students have more opportunities than ever to play college sports, sometimes regardless of their skill level. It’s an option for many. But according to experts, students and their parents must enter the small-school recruiting process with open eyes.

According to a recent NCAA study, the association’s member schools are adding nearly 8,000 athletes every year. According to another NCAA study, from 1982 to 2007 the number of Division III athletes increased from 85,521 to 158,621 – a growth rate of 85 percent.

Most of the increase has come at the smallest schools because they have little to lose and much to gain. Division III schools can’t offer athletic scholarships. They field a variety of teams while spending relatively little. Those teams bring exposure – as well as millions of dollars in tuition – to the schools’ typically small, private and expensive liberal arts campuses.

Similarly priced and sized NAIA colleges are in a comparable situation but do offer athletic scholarships.

What small schools find in the recruiting process, according to experts, are students and parents who are willing to go to any lengths for a college athletics experience.

“The parents – even if they’re smart – they’re lambs to slaughter,” said Tom Elias of College Prospects of America. “Kids are emotional. They pick a school because of the color of the uniform or because the coach is nice or the other guys in the cafeteria say it’s a cool school. Meanwhile, the parents are looking at an expense of $20,000 to $40,000 per year for four years. Maybe that school gives your kid $1,000 and you can put in the newspaper that Johnny got a scholarship. But all of a sudden the parents are getting a loan for $19,000 a year.”

Some coaches say that for some seniors, the allure of calling oneself a college athlete – along with the pomp and circumstance that surrounds their decision – directly affects their futures.

Conner athletic director Tom Stellman said as recently as 10 years ago his school would hold one or two “signing ceremonies” a year. They usually were held when a highly recruited Division I athlete signed his or her national letter of intent. Now, he says, Conner averages 40 ceremonies a year. Sometimes the athletes are going to college on scholarship. This time of year, when Division III schools are landing commitments from students, many are not.

“Our policy is supposed to be one group (signing) in the winter and one in the spring,” Stellman said. “But everybody wants their own. We need to do them all at one time, as a team. It used to be more about team, not the individual. It just kind of evolved that way. … It’s out of hand.”

How out of hand? Roster numbers tell the tale.

Lindsey Wilson, an NAIA program in Kentucky, had 33 players on its men’s basketball roster last year. Rio Grande, an NAIA program in Ohio, had 30. By contrast, NCAA Division I schools such as UC, Xavier and Kentucky carry about half that many players.

Brescia, another NAIA school in Kentucky, had a 46-player baseball roster last year. That’s 13 players more than last year’s College World Series champion, LSU.

NCAA Division III football power Mount Union started the 2008 season with 215 players, including an 84-player freshman team. Meanwhile, Division I programs are allowed just 85 total scholarships.

Local Division III schools Thomas More and Mount St. Joseph started their football programs in 1990, partly to increase the schools’ enrollments. After struggling early, both programs have been nationally ranked in recent years and maintained rosters between 90 and 120 players..

Mount St. Joseph coach Rod Huber said building a program is a process – one that places a premium on numbers.

“When we were 0-10, we took anybody who would walk and chew gum,” he said. “… I tell kids all the time, if you really love this game, there’s a Division III program for you. It might not be Mount St. Joseph. But there are places out there, like we were 10 years ago, that are just looking for bodies – anybody who wants to play.”

Even at elite small-college programs, the numbers game is evident.

Harrison graduate Steve Strassell was a standout pitcher at Division II power Tusculum (Tenn.) College. He arrived on campus in 2004 to find a 51-player roster that included 27 pitchers.

“When you’re a senior in high school and you’re being recruited, sometimes you can get a sense for how competitive it’s going to be,” he said. “You have schools come in and say, ‘We really want you, but we’d really like you to walk on and then earn a scholarship.’ You kind of get the feeling that they’re thinking, ‘Hey, worst-case scenario, we have one more body on campus paying tuition.’ ”

To that end, the athletic departments at many smaller schools assign each sport an enrollment goal – a number of roster spots each coach should fill to increase or maintain the size of the student body.

The policy has worked at Lindsey Wilson, where athletic director Willis Pooler said enrollment goals and the addition of several sports have raised the number of the school’s athletes from 400 to 700 in the last seven years.

“One of the things that athletics bring to the table from an enrollment standpoint is you’re bringing in students who might not have otherwise looked at your school,” said Pooler. “That’s important. We look at that when we look at what programs we want to offer. We also just started a nursing program. We try to attract students in all kinds of ways.”

Lindsey Wilson uses JV teams to develop varsity players and add enrollment.

“For some students, it’s just participatory,” said Pooler. “For others, it’s a way to get into the varsity lineup. … But we’re not taking people who have no business playing. They’re at least JV-level athletes coming in.”

And when it comes to NAIA programs like Lindsey Wilson, many of the JV players receive athletic scholarships. According to NAIA rules, JV scholarships don’t count against the program’s scholarship limits. So even JV recruits often receive thousands of dollars worth of incentives to continue their careers.

Cooper High School senior Shumekia Overstreet is one of those players. The undersized center, who averaged 2.0 points and 2.9 rebounds for a fledgling program that went 11-16 this past season, recently signed with Midway College. The NAIA school’s annual tuition is $24,000. After grants and academic money and $11,000 in athletic money, she’ll pay about a quarter of regular tuition.

“I was stunned (by the scholarship offer),” said Overstreet’s mother Darla. “… When she first mentioned she wanted to play basketball in college, I said, ‘Ummm, Shumekia, I don’t know.

“But she loves the game. Even if she doesn’t get a lot of playing time, she has a core group of people that she can bond with and turn to. That’s important in college.”

Brandon Sizemore, the Newport grad, will have plenty of teammates to turn to. Georgetown had 33 players on last season’s varsity and JV teams. He said he knows he’s entering the program as a JV player – the JV and varsity practice separately and play different schedules – but he hopes to crack the starting lineup.

Georgetown coach Happy Osborne wouldn’t comment about Sizemore’s future or the inner workings of his program, but it’s obvious Georgetown isn’t the only side benefiting from the arrangement. Sizemore, who landed on Georgetown’s radar after Newport’s athletic director sent out a recruiting questionnaire on his behalf, wanted to go to Georgetown even before Osborne contacted him. He said if he keeps his grades up, after grants and scholarships, he’ll pay only $2,000 of the school’s annual $35,000 tuition.

“Money would have been the only reason why I couldn’t have gone there,” he said. “I’m not the richest. Coach Osborne told me he’d see what he could do, and they came back with a great offer.”

The challenge facing small-college coaches is projecting how high school seniors will develop while giving them a fair assessment. The coaches then must decide how much scholarship money to give the player, or in the case of Division III coaches, whether or not to invite him or her to join the team. At times, it becomes an ethical dilemma.

“There are schools that bring 20 or 25 kids in as freshmen, and then the kids show up and all of a sudden they get cut,” said Mount St. Joseph men’s basketball coach Larry Cox. “The creed I try to tell our coaches: Never recruit anybody who we don’t think can ever be anything more than a JV player after two years.”

The onus, according to high school coaches, should be on the recruits. Many tell players and their parents to research the schools interested in them. Go to their games; ask to see their practices; talk to the players. Compare your skills to theirs.

Ryan Vogel is doing just that. The recent Silver Grove graduate plans on attending Thomas More in the fall. He also would like to play on the Saints’ JV basketball team. So he spent the weeks after his senior season playing in open gyms with Thomas More players to find out if he could compete.

Batavia graduate Justin Lowe said he wished he’d had that same mentality when he enrolled at Thomas More in 2000. Lowe was part of a 15-player freshman class for the Saints basketball team. But he quickly learned why some small schools bring in so many players. He received enough money in grants and academic scholarships that during his freshman season he paid only room and board. By his sophomore year, he was on academic probation. Without the academic scholarships, he owed full tuition. On top of school and basketball, he took a job at CVS before leaving school.

Lowe, now 28, still owes approximately $30,000 in student loans.

“I wanted to stay in school, but there was really nothing else I could do,” he said. “There’s school and there’s sports. But at the end of the day you have to pay your bills. I’m still happy I went there. I just wish I would have had my head on right.”

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as a high school player. Most of this media attention and hype is centered around blue chip athletes which are less than 1% of all high school players. If you do not fit into this category, which is most, you can still earn a college basketball scholarship.

Here are 3 steps to a college basketball scholarship:

1. Create a personal recruiting packet. This will include your athletic and personal resume along with 2 of your best games and a short 5 minute highlight tape.  Ideally you need to send this recruiting packets to at least 50 colleges that meet your personal assessment of schools that your academic and athletic skills are a good fit.
2. Involve your parents and coach. Players often get side tracked during recruiting. It takes many people close to you like your parents and coach to help in this process. Let them know your goals and work together with a recruiting plan that will help you succeed.
3. Be aggressive. You can not wait by the phone for coaches to call or except scholarship offers to follow the letter in the mail you received. Call coaches daily, follow up, continue to send recruiting packets, visit college coaches on your own if you have the means. Often less skilled high school basketball players can earn scholarships over more talented players simply because they followed a plan to get recruited.
4. Be Persistent. Don’t get discouraged or quit all together if the first few coaches don’t call you back or show much interest in what you have to offer. It may take 10 colleges to take a look at you or 50. The point is you must keep moving forward and stay on track during recruiting. Athletes who can do this will earn the scholarship spot.
5. Don’t Let You Academics Slip. Don’t let your grades fall your Senior year and let this be the reasons you can not earn a scholarship. While the NCAA academic requirements are low, colleges and universities have been steadily increasing their minimum requirements for athletes.

Your basketball future is in your hands now. Not the college coaches or recruiters. You can earn a college basketball scholarship if you are aggressive in your recruiting, enlist the help of those close to you and get your name and game tapes in front of college coaches.

There are no secrets on how to earn a scholarship in any sport. There are proven recruiting steps that successful high school athletes follow every year that help them earn the spot to play in college.  The recruiting season goes by fast but too many times we see athletes who give up after getting rejected by the first few schools. Follow these steps but be persistent throughout and you will have success.

CLICK HERE if you have the desire and motivation to earn a college basketball scholarship.

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Basketball scholarships get a lot of press. Players are begin discovered earlier and earlier into their high school and some in junior high. It may seem that if you are not discovered then, you can’t get a basketball scholarship. The media really skews the perception of what it takes to get recruited for basketball.

There are over 7,100 scholarships available for men in the NCAA and 9,200 for women. There are also NAIA and NJCAA scholarships. The media attention is only focused on the top 5% of high school basketball players which are considered “Blue Chip.”

If you are not in the top 5% of the country in basketball, don’t worry, you can earn a scholarship to play college basketball if you have some talent, room for improvement, and the drive to commit yourself to a long recruiting process.

Coaches look for 5 main traits in basketball recruits:

1. Maturity- How do you carry yourself on and off the court? Do you complain to coaches and refs at every bad play? Or do you keep your head high, show composure and act like an adult on and off the court?
2. Team Player- College basketball is very different than high school. You may not be the star anymore when you get to college. Are you willing to do what it takes to help the team more than yourself?
3. “Coachability”- Do you show room for improvement and are you willing to do what the coach says to improve your game?
4. Willingness- Are you willing to put the team above your personal goals? College coaches want to to win and will ask you to do whatever it takes to help the team. Are you willing to play multiple positions? Be a practice player? Sacrifice your stats for team wins?
5. Academics- Players who do better in the classroom as easier to coach, cause less problems off the court and are better able to handle the pressures of the college game.

Basketball is a headcount sport in the NCAA. Scholarships are awarded on a full ride basis. For men in NCAA DI there are 13 scholarships per team. DII has 10. For women in DI there are 15 and 10 scholarship in DII. This may not sound like a lot but considering there are hundreds of teams in both DI and DII, you can find a college that will award you a basketball scholarship.

Follow a recruiting system that shows coaches you are the recruit for them. Be willing and able to commit months to the recruiting process and show coaches who you are as a person and player and you will earn a basketball scholarship to play in college.

CLICK HERE if you have the ability and mental drive to get a college basketball scholarship.

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If you want a college athletic scholarship then don’t wait any longer. You must start today. Learn how to choose the right athletic conference for your talents and have a successful recruiting season ending with a scholarship offer.

CLICK HERE to see the college athletic scholarship recruiting guide that will show you how to earn the athletic scholarship you deserve.

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