stepped down. My son went anyway. Sharis oldest son went across the country for his opportunity to play football, but his college caree | Forum

DOVER, Del. Frank Robinson Nationals Jersey . -- Ed Royds ran for two touchdowns, Reggie White Jr. had 11 catches for 129 yards -- all career highs -- and Monmouth beat Delaware State 34-20 on Saturday.Matt White made field goals of 28 and 33 yards for the Hawks (2-0).Royds scored on a 4-yard run that capped a 17-play, 79-yard drive and gave Monmouth a 34-20 lead with 6:56 to play. Four plays later, Kamau Dumas intercepted a pass from Delaware States Daniel Epperson to seal it.After Royds first touchdown from 1 yard out made it 27-0 late in the third quarter, Delaware State (0-2) scored 20-straight points. Brycen Alleyne scored on a 64-yard run, Epperson hit Jerimiah Williams for a 46-yard touchdown and Kameron Rogers blocked a punt that Brock Nichols returned 13 yards for a score to pull the Hornets within seven with 14:47 remaining.Royds finished with 92 yards rushing on a career-high 25 carries. Fernando Rodney Nationals Jersey . -- PGA TOUR Canada member Steve Saunders took a three-stroke lead Saturday in the Web. Roenis Elias Jersey . Jon Montgomerys gold medal in skeleton at the Whistler Sliding Centre and his subsequent auctioning off of a pitcher of beer in the village square elevated him to folk-hero status. https:///...ersey-nationals.html . The quest begins with what is supposed to be an easy one, although Germany has traditionally been a stubborn opponent to Canadian teams at international tournaments. We all do it. We sit on the field, in the stands, in the gym. We watch our young kids compete, improve, show promise, and we fantasize about that day when our talented little goalkeeper/point guard/running back will be a college athlete. At that point, we just hope someday they want it, too.And when they express an interest, we pour resources into that fantasy. By resources, of course, we mean time and money: private trainers, travel teams, club fees, recruiting showcases, recruiting services. There is nothing wrong with the fantasy, by the way. Its a good one. Collegiate athletics often provides young people extraordinary, character-building, once-in-a-lifetime experiences. But it comes with some realities that only begin with the process of getting there.The statistics are not hard to find.* According to the NCAA, 8 million kids are participating in high school sports.* Only 480,000 of them (6 percent) will eventually compete in collegiate athletics at an NCAA program.* Only 56 percent of those athletes will receive some level of scholarship assistance, and that amount averages less than $11,000 per student athlete.The myths, meanwhile, are not hard to bust.* Its all about the scholarship. Full-ride scholarships are not the norm in college athletics. Only six NCAA Division I sports offer full scholarships for athletes who make the team: football, mens and womens basketball, womens gymnastics, volleyball and tennis. The rest of the NCAA sports are called equivalency sports, in which each team has a set number of scholarships (11.7 in Division I college baseball, for example), and those scholarships are divided up among the players on the roster at increments determined by the head coach. That means some kids might get half of their tuition paid for. Others might only get their books covered. Some get nothing but a spot on the roster.* College programs will come looking for you. In reality, even the strongest, hardest-working, most talented kids on your high school team likely arent going to catch the eye of big-time college programs without a lot of legwork on your part.* If youre good enough, youll get your pick of schools. Often, kids who are being recruited are not choosing among the colleges they are most interested in attending, but among those who are most interested in them. And equally often, those choices are limited.And if you are a parent of a kid who truly, honestly wants to be a college athlete, one who has already demonstrated he or she is willing to put in the work and the effort to achieve that goal, keeping it real is the best thing you can do.I think as parents, we have to be realistic about where our kids fit in, said my friend Shari, whose three kids have been recruited by colleges in the past five years. It was a very different story for each of them.Indeed. In our house, our experience was shepherding a hard-working kid who was a successful high school athlete to the best opportunity he would have to play baseball for another four years. Because lets face it, considering the minuscule number of college athletes who end up playing professionally in their given spports, that is what we are talking about here. Daniel Hudson Jersey. A chance to play for four more years.As a family, we put in a lot of labor, setting him up for exposure by signing him up for showcases and individual recruiting events at specific schools. He joined summer teams that might maximize his chance to get seen.He emailed coaches, sent videos. We created a spreadsheet to keep track, along with a nice one-page reference to his stats, academic achievements and goals. We suggested to him that if he was interested in a school, he should check their roster on the website and see how many of the guys on the team were his size. (A reality check for our 5-foot-9 right-handed pitcher.) We reminded him to follow up. We encouraged him through the frustration of not getting a response from a school he really liked, or the coach who said he didnt get a chance to come out and see him throw after all.?And on the odd day that he didnt throw particularly well, we tried (really hard, in my case) not to say much at all.We watched him for signs that maybe this wasnt what he really wanted. But he kept working. And he kept wanting. So we kept going.Thats not to say we did everything right. But we did it with a sense of reality and appropriate expectation that this was going to be hard, and it wasnt just going to happen because it was what he wanted.My son ended up at a Division III school, where he has indeed gotten his opportunity to play -- an opportunity initiated by a contact from his high school coach and barely any of the stuff we did. And sometimes, that is just how it goes.Sharis oldest son, a football player, used a recruiting service that matched him up with a Division I-AA school that was a fit for his academic profile. Her middle son is a Division I swimmer at a school in the Midwest after getting a late start in the recruiting process. And her youngest daughter, a swimmer and high school senior, began making lists and sending out letters to coaches in her sophomore year.You cant sit back and wait to be discovered at a meet or a tournament, Shari said. In a lot of instances, like 99.9 percent of the time, unless you are a star athlete who gets a lot of press coverage, you have to be very proactive, get your face in front of these coaches. And once you do that, its follow-through, follow-through, follow-through.And still, theres no guarantee how things will turn out. The week after my son decided where he would be going to school, the coach stepped down. My son went anyway. Sharis oldest son went across the country for his opportunity to play football, but his college career was limited by injury. He still loved his college experience.It is a tenuous thing, the opportunity to be a college athlete. Shari was right when she called it a gamble. Shes also right about this:I think kids end up where they were meant to be, even if its maybe not where they thought, she said. But I think thats true whether they are an athlete or not.A reality that trumps fantasy every time. ' ' '