It’s easy to understand why so many kids want to become professional athletes. But let’s calculate what the odds of becoming a pro really are. They are slimmer than you think.
Tom Farrey, the director of the Sports and Society Program at the Aspen Institute and author of Game On: The All-American Race to Make Champions of Our Children writes about how extremely difficult it is to make the pros. And it’s not just his personal opinion. In fact, the NCAA has compiled statistics on the number of high school athletes who move on to play sports at the professional level. According to their data, a very low percentage of basketball and football players that compete in high school then eventually move up to the professional rank. For example, just 44 male players of almost 156,000 will be drafted in the NBA after college, which makes just .03% chance of a pro career.
The Odds of success study shows there are over a million high school football players in the U.S., but only 256 fortunate football stars go pro each year. That means the odds of being drafted are 1 in 4,233. The likelihood of making it to the NBA is even slimmer: Only 1 in 11,171 men’s high school basketball stars dribble their way into the pros.
The situation is pretty similar in women’s basketball, according to the ScholarshipStats.com study, discovering that just 1 in 12,114 high school players is later drafted to the WNBA.
The Canadian study Odds of Success also discovered that in some sports, like ice hockey and baseball, the odds are better. However, many researches like the one from usatoday state that even though the numbers vary between the sports, the overall percentage of young athletes becoming pros is really low. According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, even in baseball, only a tiny percentage of high school athletes actually go on to play professionally — just 1 in 2,451 men’s high school basketball players will get drafted by a National Basketball Association team.
Here at SportyFi, we find these stats very alarming and are on the mission to, hopefully, change these numbers for good. For sure, there are many athletic kids that stop practicing sports just before making a pro roster because of different factors like injuries, lack of motivation or any other personal reason. But what is even sadder is that finance is still (or even more today) a deciding factor when it comes to taking one’s athlete’s career to the world stage. It’s really hard for aspiring young athletes to search for investors in order to enter the professional ranks. Unless they haven’t already signed a huge sponsorship deal (happens very rarely at this age and stage of one’s career) or were luckily born into a well off family, then they are left pretty much on their own.
Knowing how important it is to have all the necessary resources when turning pro, SportyFi is revolutionizing financing in the sports industry by deploying a platform connecting young promising athletes with potential investors ready to back-up the rising careers of future superstars. Let’s make those odds better!
Need more details? Check out the SportyFi Website or read the SportyFi Whitepaper. And come chat with us on Telegram.