Parents investing large amounts of time and money in their athletic offspring with the belief that they’re nurturing a possible professional player should take note: Odds are, you’re wrong.
But you’re not alone. An astonishing 26 percent of parents with high-school-age children who play sports hope their child will become a professional athlete one day, according to a recent poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The percentages are even greater among less-educated and lower-income parents: 44 percent of parents with a high school education or less and 39 percent of parents with a household income of less than $50,000 a year are dreaming of the bigs and the majors for their kids.
Those parents are deluding themselves, and possibly cheating their children out of other opportunities if they are demanding a single-minded approach to the game. The National Collegiate Athletic Association puts the real odds right up front on its website, and they’re nowhere near one in four. For baseball, only a little more than half of 1 percent of high school players who go on to play in college will be drafted by Major League Baseball (0.6 percent), and even of those, most will not ever play in the majors — only about 17 percent of draft picks play in even a single big league game. That means only about 1 in 1,000 baseball players who play in high school ever gets a chance in make it big — and the odds of becoming a real star are even smaller.
And that’s baseball. According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the odds of going from high school play and then college to become a professional baseball player are higher than those in football, men’s or women’s basketball, or men’s soccer. (The percentages for men’s ice hockey are similar to those for baseball.) Of that 26 percent of hopeful baseball parents, to stick to that example, about 98 percent will be disappointed.
