The odds of going pro
About one high school basketball player in thirty plays in college. About one college player in a hundred makes the NBA or WNBA.
Millions of children play a sport and dream of doing it for a living. A small number do. The National Collegiate Athletic Association, which runs college sport in the United States, publishes a careful estimate of how small, sport by sport, comparing how many students play in high school with how many play in college and how many are drafted into the major professional leagues.
The numbers
From the NCAA’s most recent figures:
- Men’s basketball. About 3.6% of high school players go on to play for an NCAA team. Of NCAA players, about 1.0% are drafted by the NBA.
- Women’s basketball. About 4.7% of high school players go on to NCAA teams, and about 0.8% of NCAA players are drafted by the WNBA.
- Football. About 8.1% of high school players go on to NCAA teams, and about 1.4% of NCAA players are drafted by the NFL.
- Baseball. About 8.8% of high school players go on to NCAA teams, and about 4.9% of NCAA players are drafted by Major League Baseball, though most draftees begin in the minor leagues and many never reach the majors.
Multiply the two steps together and the odds for a high school basketball player of being drafted are a few in ten thousand. Being drafted is not the same as a career, either: many draftees play only a season or two at the top level.
Why the funnel is so narrow
Professional leagues have a fixed number of places, and those places are open to the best players in the world, not only the best in one country. Each year a few hundred new players enter the major American leagues combined, from a pool of millions who played in school. The talent needed to make it is real and rare; so is the luck of staying healthy, being seen by the right coach and peaking at the right age.
Sports outside the US have their own versions of the same funnel. Professional football academies in Europe and Brazil take in thousands of promising children, and only a small fraction ever play a professional match.
What happens to everybody else
The NCAA’s figures make one more point that is easy to miss: for most college athletes, the sport is a route to a degree, not to a living. College sport pays many students’ tuition and gives them a team, discipline and a network. Most will work in something else, and many do well there.
The people who struggle most are often those who were close: good enough to give everything to the attempt, not quite good enough to make a career of it, and late to start building another one. A sporting career that ends at twenty-two or twenty-eight leaves a person with a body that took years of strain and a working life that is just starting.
The same is true of other dreams
Sport publishes its odds more clearly than most fields, but music, acting, writing and art have funnels just as narrow. In most of them, a small number of people earn most of the money and most of the rest earn a modest living or none from the work itself. That is not an argument against trying. It is an argument for knowing the odds, and for having a plan for the life that happens either way.
Questions people ask
Which sport has the best odds of going pro? Of the major American sports in the NCAA’s figures, baseball has the highest share of college players drafted, though most draftees spend years in the minor leagues and many never reach the majors. Basketball has some of the lowest odds, because each team has so few roster places.
Do college athletes get paid? Rules on paying college athletes have changed in recent years, and some top athletes now earn money from their name, image and likeness. For the great majority, the main financial benefit of college sport is still a scholarship towards tuition.
How long do professional careers last? Usually not long. In most professional team sports the average career is a few seasons, much shorter than most people expect, which is why the years after sport matter so much.
In One Life
A small number of lives in One Life are dealt a rare gift: for sport, music, performing, leadership or building a company. The game is honest about it. In the world, a gift like that is rarer than one life in a thousand. The game deals one to about one life in four, because greatness is something players should get to play, and it says so in the first scene.
From there, the climb is played at real odds. Each rung — the academy, the first contract, the big stage — starts from the real chances for somebody already standing on it, raised by the gift and by how the climb has been played. Each rolled scene shows THE REAL ODDS, the world’s number, so nobody mistakes the game’s for it. Most climbs stop somewhere, and the game treats that as a life too: a coach, a session player, a founder who sold early.