Playing for Something Beyond a Scholarship

At some point in your athletic career, someone made the scholarship the point.

The coaches who evaluated you. The recruiting services. The conversations at home about your future and what sport could do for it. The culture of high school athletics has increasingly organized itself around the scholarship as the measure of athletic success — which means the player who doesn’t get one has failed, and the player who does get one has achieved the point of the whole enterprise.

That is a distortion. And it costs athletes something real.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

As working for the Lord, not for human masters. The instruction reorients the motivation of the work away from the external evaluator — the coach, the recruiting service, the scholarship committee — and toward something that cannot be taken away by a rejection letter. The work has inherent worth because of who it is offered to, not because of what it produces in the market.

Here is what you knew before the recruiting culture told you otherwise: you play because the game is good. Because competing hard and improving and being part of something with your teammates is intrinsically valuable regardless of what it produces in college applications. Because your body is capable of remarkable things and the discipline and joy of training those capabilities is worth doing for its own sake.

The scholarship is a wonderful thing if it comes. It is not the point of the sport. The athlete who plays with awareness of the intrinsic value of what they are doing — who has not let the recruiting market become the only reason they get out of bed for early practice — is a better athlete and a more durable one than the athlete whose motivation is entirely external.

Remember why you started. Play for that reason. The scholarship, if it comes, will be a good outcome of playing something worth playing. It is not the reason the sport is worth playing.

This question often produces a moment of genuine reconnection for athletes who have lost the intrinsic motivation under the weight of the recruiting process.