Just over 3 percent of high school men’s and women’s basketball players make it to the NCAA. For years, they’ve moved on to higher and higher levels of competition, eventually advancing farther than as much as 97 percent of their peers. Some athletes, he said, may be well aware of the NCAA’s research, but “this does not alter their belief, because they’re thinking, ‘I am not a statistic.’”īy the time athletes reach college sports, they’re standing near the top of an athletic pyramid. It’s a “self-bias phenomenon,” Tenenbaum said, exacerbated by the level of adulation that surrounds successful athletes.
#Athlete vs mathlete timeout professional#
Going Pro: Division I Perceptions and Realityįor many athletes, the idea they will one day play at the professional level is a seed that is planted long before they’re even approached by colleges, said Gershon Tenenbaum, a sports psychology professor at Florida State University. After all, some music schools prominently display their alumni who have won Grammy and Tony awards. On its recruiting website, UCLA is described as “#1 in Olympic Gold Medals from 1984 to 2008" and “#1 in professional athletes.”Ī UCLA spokesman said for athletes who do dream of going professional, the information can be helpful when choosing a program. Michigan State University entices basketball recruits with a running list of all the NBA players who first played under its successful basketball coach Tom Izzo. Some college programs feed those hopes by prominently advertising their connections to professional sports when recruiting athletes. Only 1.2 percent of college basketball players will be drafted by a National Basketball Association team. More than half of Division II players say the same, as do 21 percent of Division III players. More than three-quarters of men’s basketball players in Division I say they believe it is at least “somewhat likely” they will play professionally. Men's hoops players are the most unrealistic. (The NCAA said that it is currently procuring data on a player’s chances of joining other professional leagues, such as those in Europe, but the information is not yet available.) About 45 percent of Division I women’s basketball players think they have a chance to play professional basketball, but only 0.9 percent of players are drafted by a Women’s National Basketball Association team. The problem is so pervasive that Mark Emmert, the NCAA’s president, devoted significant space to the issue during his most recent state of the association address, saying that "athletes often have incredibly unrealistic perceptions of their professional prospects."Īccording to NCAA surveys, more than 60 percent of Division I college men’s ice hockey players think it’s likely they’ll play professionally, but less than 1 percent ever go on Think this should be plural "play," but wasn't sure - PF***that's what i think too but grammar check keeps saying "play" -jn to the National Hockey League. Yet college athletes vastly overestimate their chances of playing professional sports. “If you had to generalize, you could easily say no one goes pro,” he said. Odds are, Huma said, he likely wouldn’t have played in the NFL even if he remained healthy.
Then, in 1998, a hip injury ended Huma's football career and ensured that he would remain a member of a different, less hopeful cohort: the 98 percent of college football players who never go pro. With that, Huma briefly joined the 52 percent of Division I football players who believe it is likely they will play in the National Football League, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association's own data. “But then it got into my head that maybe it actually was.”
“I was going to make sure I got my degree, and I really didn’t think the NFL was much of a possibility for me,” he said. About halfway through his football career at the University of California at Los Angeles, Ramogi Huma, founder of the National College Players Association, said a coach told him during an off-season meeting that he “was an NFL guy with real potential.” The coach's comment was a surprise to the undersized linebacker.
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