Your Chances to Play a Sport in College
These are the numbers of spots available at each NCAA level by sport
In this post, we are quantifying your chances of playing in college.
Why?
Not to freak you out, but rather to provide context for your process based on the sport you play.
Let’s break it down.
Your Chances to Play a Sport in College
Playing a college sport is a privilege.
Out of the over seven million high school athletes in the United States, only ~6.4% or 450,000 end up playing their sport in one of the NCAA’s three divisions (D1, D2, or D3).1
Today we dig a level deeper and bring you tangible insights into what this means for your chances to play your sport in particular.
In the table below we review the data for NCAA “Championship Sports” and break out the percentages of athletes by sport for both men and women so it is easy to understand.
The number of High school athletes in the United States that play an NCAA sport.
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The Takeaways
Here’s what stood out to us when you comb through the numbers…
Female high school have a higher likelihood of playing in college than their male peers
First is the disparity between men’s and women’s sports participation at the high school level.
This is mirrored at the next level, and although there are less college roster spots for women they do have a slightly higher chance of playing in one of the NCAA’s three divisions - 6.5% vs. 6.3%.
This should start to equalize slightly as more women’s sports like flag football get added to NCAA schools across the country.
The best odds to play your sport in college? Women’s Ice Hockey
Women’s Ice Hockey has by far the lowest level of high school athletics participation amongst the NCAA championship sports included in this data set.
As a result, around 1 in every 3 high school women’s ice hockey athletes will play their sport in college (33.6%).
The chances are highest at the NCAA Division 3 level where 21.3% of the high school ice hockey players will end up.
On the men’s side, Ice hockey athletes also have a high likelihood of playing in college at 13.3% - but the highest chance is generated by men’s lacrosse at 14.4%.
The worst odds to play your sport in college? Men’s Wrestling
This is a problem of opportunities as wrestling is a very popular high school sport with over 250,000 participants.
However, at the NCAA level there are just over 8,000 slots open which limits the likelihood of making the jump to the next level to a lowly 3.2%.
Men’s basketball is a highly competitive sport as well, with around 3.5% making it to the NCAA level (only 1% of high school athletes go D1, 1% go D2, and the remaining 1.5% go D3).
On the women’s side, volleyball has the toughest odds of playing in college at 3.9%.
Women’s volleyball has the second highest participation amongst all sports, coming in just behind track and field, but it is likely limited by roster sizes in how many opportunities it can provide.
Thanks For Reading
We hope you enjoyed this look into the odds of high school athletes making it to play their sport in one the NCAA’s three divisions.
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