4 Ways to UNLOCK a Scholarship

Hey, how you doing, Alex here. Thanks for joining me. In today's episode, we are talking about the four ways you can receive a scholarship for college. I'm excited to go over this because, hey, college is expensive these days, so anything can help. And if you're new to my channel, my name is Alex Swenson. I'm A former Division 1 college coach, scout and recruiter with 11 years of experience. And now what I do is help high school athletes navigate this college recruiting process. And if you're looking for more help going through this and navigating so you don't have to go blind at this recruiting process, there's really two ways that I can help. Number one is my premier athletes recruiting platform that's baseball specific for baseball players only. So if you're interested, you create a free profile down below. I'm gonna leave a link down below where you'll be able to create a free profile and check that out. And number two is, is my premier athletes recruiting program that's baseball specific as well. And you'll be working directly with me and I'll guide and direct you through that. You can apply on my website. I'm gonna leave that link down below. Well, with that said, let's go on and dive into the four scholarships you can receive as we go through this process. The first scholarship that we're gonna go over today. And by the way, these are in no particular order, and I should say this as well, this is a general overview. There is specifics on, on a school, by school basis, on a level basis as we go. And what do I mean by that? Some schools will accept certain scholarships. Some schools will not accept certain scholarships. Some schools will give certain scholarships. Some schools will not give scholarships. Okay, and I'm going to go into a little bit, but not all of these nuances, if you will, because that would take forever as we go. So let's talk about the first one, athletic scholarship. That is the first one we're going to cover today. In what schools or what levels give athletic scholarship? So the Division 1 level gives an athletic scholarship, but not actually all the Division 1 schools give an athletic scholarship. We'll talk about that here in a minute. Division two gives athletic scholarships. Division three does not give athletic scholarships. The next level is naia. They give athletic scholarships. And the next level there, last but not least, is junior college. Junior college also gives athletic scholarships. So rewinding back to number one, Division one, most schools give an athletic scholarship, but there's two leagues that do not give an athletic scholarship. That is the Ivy League, and that is the Patriot League, okay? So that's important to know if you're looking for an athletic scholarship and you're going after some of those schools. Just, just FYI, they don't give athletic scholarships, okay? And then there's some differences. I'm going to talk just today about Division 1 because most of my audience is interested at the Division 1 level. Not to say that Division 2, Division 3, NAI and JUCO are not worthy. I'm just going into detail there. I'm actually a big advocate of D2s and D3s and NAI and JUCO as well. But division one level, okay? It's important to know that, hey, they only can max out scholarships at 11.7 scholarships right now as of this recording. This is going to change, hopefully in the future where they'll get more scholarships. But that does not mean every school has 11.7 athletic scholarships to give out, okay? Some schools have 10, some schools have 8, 7, 5, 4, 3, 2. Some schools have no athletic scholarships to give out, okay? And they have to divvy those out. And on average is a rough average here on an athletic scholarship basis given out to a player, it's around 25 to 30%, if you will. And that will change as we go, as we go through this process. And hopefully scholarships will increase as we go through this. But I wanted to kind of give an overview of that. And how do you get an athletic scholarship? Okay. One, it is the coaching staff, the recruiting coordinator, the head coach, the specific position coach. They need to like your athletic ability to warrant them giving you an athletic scholarship. Okay? So maybe you don't receive an athletic scholarship at the Division I level, but you could receive one at the Division 2 level because your athletic ability meets that level. Okay? Don't just go after athletic scholarships at only the division one level. Maybe power five to mid majors. Go after him from D2. And remember, D3 does not NAI or juco if that's a good fit for you, okay? This kind of helps us making sure when we're targeting certain schools that we're not on that D1 or bus or Power 5 or bus mindset, because you could receive it specifically if your athletic ability meets that school. That's very, very key. As we go through this, you guys have heard me kind of talk about our athletic ability, kind of athletic standards of where we need to meet and certain levels, okay? And go back and watch some of my videos if you haven't seen that. So making sure our athletic ability Fits. Okay, that particular school. That is the first scholarship. Let's get to number two. Number two is an academic scholarship. This is huge. And this can help so much. And frankly, you can get a lot more money, especially if you're really good in the classroom or if you're a good test taker, you're going to get a lot more money than an athletic scholarship. Because in baseball, as we kind of just went over, there's not a lot of athletic money to go around. So academic money can help a lot. Again, this helped me a lot. I did really well in high school. When I said really well, it wasn't like the top of my class, but I had a good gpa. I wasn't the best test taker. I didn't have the best sat, but my GPA really helped me and I was able to get an academic scholarship. And what can also happen for certain schools, and I should caveat this, not every school, but many schools give an academic scholarship. And then there's some schools that they call stacking. You can stack an academic scholarship on top of an athletic scholarship, which helps a lot because again, college is really, really expensive these days. So staying focused in the classroom with your gpa and if you are a good test taker, man, take those tests. I know that these days, tests, the schools aren't necessarily requiring tests, but if you are a good test taker and you can show that, go on and do that. All right. If you're not, you really need to make sure your GPA is high and continue to climb as high as you possibly can. And this is important, especially for my early high school players. Start off strong, okay? It's so much easier to maintain a good GPA than starting off slow and not doing well and then trying to climb back. Have people done it and do it every year? Absolutely. It's just. It's a tough. It's a tougher road. It's a tougher road as we go from the academic side. And then this is a big one, too. All right. As a former college coach, scout, and recruiter, and talking to these college recruiters and scouts is they're going to look at players. There's so many players out there that are equal to each other around the country because recruiting is done around the country more than ever these days. So you've got player A and player B. Let's use an example of a catcher, player A and player B catching wise. Athletically, they're pretty much the same player. So what's going to separate them? There's a couple things. First one is going to be your academics. Okay? Your academics is going to be here. So player A, player B, player A has a 2.9 GPA. Player B has a 3.6. Who do you think they're going to definitely go towards or give them the benefit of the doubt there, 100%, the 3.6 GPA. Okay, that is big. And then they're going to check off your character, making sure that, that you're going to fit that team character wise. All right, that's very, very important. So academics are just so important in this process and starting off strong. And if you didn't start off strong, don't stress but get on the books and making sure that you're climbing up and doing what you need to do to raise your GPA and put yourself in a good position if you're going to take your standardized test. Number three is a need based scholarship. College is extremely expensive these days. It's kind of ridiculous how expensive it is these days in my opinion. So if your family qualifies to get a need based scholarship, that is fantastic. And where do you do this? Okay, go on and Google this. But you'll put in Free Application for Federal Student Aid and the acronym is F A F S A. You can go on and apply for free and see if you qualify because any amount of money will will help as we go through this college process. And last but definitely not least, number four, a merit based scholarship. So these can be awarded for a number of different reasons, a number of different achievements that are outside athletics and outside academics. And some examples of those could be really just the qualities you have as a person or certain talents that you might have. Also things that you have done in your activities in the community. So like community service or any leadership roles that you have done in high school or even previous to that can help you get a scholarship. So make sure that you are proactive in your school and into the community helping people. Because this is very attractive to certain colleges and their admissions of bringing quality people in that have done and made big impacts and they are willing to give big scholarships and as they go and see this. So this is really overlooked frankly for a number of different. I didn't do this, I wish I did this and applied for this. And it's just certain applications you can go on and Google merit based scholarships as well and look into particular schools that you are looking at and interested in because certain schools will accept certain merit based that you can apply for and some schools will not. So just do your research on that. Hopefully you got something from from today's episode. If you did, please make sure to smash that like button a thumbs up and subscribe to my YouTube channel and or podcast if you're listening on the podcast and I will see you in the next video. Take care.