College Sports Recruiters Sign Up 8th Grade Basketball Player

As if sports scholarships were not already hyper-competitive, now some coaches are looking past high school recruits to sign up 8th graders. A University of Sothern California recruiter just offered Ryan Boatright a $188,000 scholarship:

The kid’s name is Ryan Boatright, he’s 14, 5-foot-10 and from Illinois, and still not sure which Aurora high school, East or West, he wants to attend. But he won’t have that problem with college. Ryan left Floyd’s basketball summer camp at USC last weekend with a promise to return in 2011.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer article referenced above also notes that in other countries athletes are routinely selected at a young age:

Developing athletic talent is not only cheaper, but a whole lot less chaotic when it’s run by the government, or by powerful clubs, such as the soccer teams in Europe. There, talents are identified even earlier than 14, catalogued, sent to academies, signed, trained and delivered to pros a few years later at fixed costs.

Yahoo! announced they were buying the Rivals.com college and high school sports news and recruiting network of websites in a deal rumored to be in the $100 million range. If the recruits keep getting younger, they may have bought on early in a growing high value market, but what does this do for the sports and kids? Will it affect their egos? How will they do in high school knowing they are sitting on a full ride? What happens if they change their minds?

Anyone who has served in the military knows 4 years is a long time. And the military is also recruiting early teenagers, using war video games and pizza parties:

Wardynski began developing the game after a similar recruiting crisis in 1999, when top Army officials were looking for a way to reach out to potential recruits with minimal cost. Wardynski wanted an economical way to counter pop-culture images of the military with a no-nonsense approach to being a soldier. The game, he decided, would provide a gateway to information and entertainment, targeting boys 14 and older.

What happens if this enterprising cataloging extends beyond sports and further into other markets? Might people resent their careers or miss what they were really meant to do? What happens to math and science when a kid who is a genius at them commits himself to another field before she knows what a square root is?

Sure we publish tips to help high school juniors and seniors write scholarship application essays and apply for college, but does an 8th grader know what she wants? How can a person know what they want of themselves when they have seen so little of the world and have just hit puberty?

Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.