My daughter Kim

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Football scholarships in the USA, A Parents DIY Guide.

Being a parent is a tough job sometimes, it’s a very expensive one if you have two or more kids, especially if they all love playing football. Both of my girls are football mad and play the game most of the year. Most women’s and girls teams in the UK are funded by subs and parents with two or more kids do struggle to make sure they all get into organised sport.

It’s even harder if they have ambition and a fair bit of talent to be able to get them into the clubs that have the best coaches and players. The reality is that travel and training costs make it almost impossible for some kids to get the right training program for them as a player. The same has to be said in respect of the rising cost of university education in the UK and the huge debt your child could possibly carry into the first years of their working life. This is even more evident when you are from a disadvantaged background or your parents are on low incomes.

That’s where a football scholarship could be a solution, not only in the development of your son or daughter as a player but the chance to study at a good university and gain a degree.

Now some of you may be wondering why we chose to look at American colleges and universities, the simple answer is choice.  To get our daughter into a top football program coupled with the right courses for her at a UK university would be almost impossible without her having to rely heavily on student and personal loans all of which would add up to Thirty thousand pounds or more. This is clearly not going to be appealing to a seventeen year old who has watched her mum struggle to juggle finances to make sure both of our girls get to enjoy football.

With a full scholarship all we have to deal with is the cost of flights and medical insurance. Over four years we will only need to find about sixteen thousand pounds to cover her costs. It works out 14k or so cheaper in the long run.  Still not cheap but a whole heap easier to pay off in a sensible timescale at reasonable rates.

Now there are ‘specialist agencies’ that secure scholarships for ‘hundreds’ of students annually, we spoke to four of them and even went to an interview with one.  I use the term interview loosely here; it was more a power-point presentation and sales pitch. When the young chap mentioned a fee for a training game and a further two grand to facilitate offers of up to three ‘full rides’ and at least 9 offers of varying degree without even seeing my daughter play we thanked him for his time and left. The lowest quote we had was two thousand pounds up front; it was never going to be an option for us. In fact the one we went to see was clearly that focussed on getting the money out of us he forgot to tell his office we weren’t interested and we had them ring on two further occasions trying to set up interviews again. I finally had to speak to them in some rather colourful language that made our position very clear.

Be aware of

Now before I tell you how to do it I have to let you know a few things I have discovered while looking into scholarships in the USA.

The first thing you need to understand is that the Student Loans Department, Sport England, UK Sport and all of the other government funded bodies are a dead end. Not one of them will help you secure funding to travel to the USA to study. If you choose to study within the EU you might get some of it by way of loans and grants. Apparently it is a case of opportunity for all but only if you study where they dictate because of long standing agreements with the EU.

The FA will not help either. Despite my daughter being identified as gifted and talented, someone our county FA wants involved in coaching and refereeing young players in girls football. There is no assistance available from the games governing body. I often struggle to reconcile the FA claims of ‘football for all’ when it’s clear that there is no real support for youngsters who come from disadvantaged backgrounds as individuals. All of the support seems targeted at clubs or community projects or on those few players that make it into the centres of excellence.

Some banks will do career and development loans but only for those students on courses they cover under their particular scheme, it’s a very small list too. The only other option they offer is a personal loan but the repayments on that would start immediately and to be honest there are many families in financial positions that would preclude them from applying for one anyway.

The upshot being that even if your kid is good enough to secure a ‘full ride’, and they are few and far between it’s going to cost a bit to get them to and from the USA a couple of times a year. Many universities also only offer annual scholarship deals that are performance based so you could start on a full deal but have it cut at the end of any given year based on not only football performance but performance in the class room. Many universities in the USA pride themselves on a good GPA from student athletes.

Most prospective students may have to rely on family for funding and hope that they qualify for grants or bursaries from charitable organisations and benevolent trusts. Not easy to do and very time consuming but it can be done with a bit of work.

My final word of caution before I let you know how I went about securing a scholarship for my daughter is this.

Be absolutely sure your kid has the mindset and attitude needed to deal with being separated from family and friends for 9 months of the year for four years at least. If you have the slightest doubt, stop reading this now and go and brew up.

How I did it

I suppose the first thing to tell you is this, it’s not going to be free, easy or done in two or three days. It’s going to cost you about £500-00 as a rough guide depending on just how much effort and time you put into it. I’m laying it out, as I would do it now given all of the research I put in and information I have available.

 Five hundred pounds is a lot cheaper than paying someone two grand to tell you about all of the costs I’m about to reveal and send a few emails. The fifteen hundred quid I saved avoiding the ‘specialists’ is nearly the cost of a years flights to the USA.

The biggest expense you are likely to incur other than the airfares and insurance is going to be for good quality un-edited video footage of your kid playing for their club side. The higher the level your son or daughter plays at the better.

 If you own a camera and know what you are doing with it you may well save yourself a heap of money. Most of the coaches we contacted asked for links to You-tube so they could have a good look at what my daughter offered to their program as a player.

Don’t edit the footage, it only gives the impression you are trying to hide your kid’s weak points. If they know the level your youngster is at they can start to plan how to develop them as a player. It might cost up to £250-00/300-00 to have the video done professionally. I dropped lucky as I have a mate who does video production for a living so I saved the cost as he donated his time and services.

Send the links to your footage along with your youngsters CV, GCSE and AS level results to the coaching staff at the universities in the NCAA divisions 1 and 2. In my experience none of the Division 3 schools will offer scholarships. Approach the universities you feel offer the right program and courses for your son or daughter to pursue their chosen career path. You can find a comprehensive list of Division 1 and 2 universities and colleges at http://web1.ncaa.org/memberLinks/links.jsp?div=1

The NCAA is the National Collegiate Athletics Association and they are the governing body for student athletes in the USA. Your son or daughter will also have to register with the NCAA as an athlete. It should cost around £75-00 depending on exchange rates.

The next expense will be the SAT test required by the NCAA clearing house, this is to ensure all student athletes are able to study at a level that will see them gain a decent result in their chosen subjects. The SAT can be booked here http://sat.collegeboard.com/home . They will cost in the region of £45-00 again depending on the Dollar/ Pound exchange rate.

The final cost you will have to pay up front so to speak is the cost of a student visa; A F1 student visa to the USA will cost £121-00 or thereabouts again depending on exchange rates at the time of application. Information on Visas can be found here http://usimmigration.visapro.com/F1-Student-Visa.asp .

Any university that is going to invest in your son or daughter will have a proven track record when it comes to dealing with questions from parents and students from the UK and will have an international admissions department that will be able to advise you on specific requirements in all aspects of an application to a university in the USA. They will also be able to advise you on insurance plans and what needs to be covered. They will also be able to help with your visa application.

Coaches from the universities are only allowed to contact you once a week whilst you are considering offers from their school. They are allowed to answer any questions you ask directly but are not allowed to ring or email unless you ask them to.

We had one or two schools have different members of staff ring to get round the rule, we also had one or two apply undue pressure to sign up with them before we had time to consider other offers but on the whole they stuck to the rules as laid out by the NCAA.

In all I sent over a hundred emails and got thirty replies, some with partial scholarships, two saying they felt my daughter would not be suited to their program but crucially we had six offers of full scholarships.

Think long and hard on the offers you receive, make sure the school offers not only a decent sports program but make sure it has a high graduation rate too.

Bigger is not always better when it comes to the scholarships either. Your son or daughter will get more from the experience if the class sizes are reasonable and the campus is not over crowded.

Out of those six, we discounted two for being too pushy, one for being too much of a hassle in respect of travel and connecting flights.

Of the three left we took the degree courses on offer into account and had a good look at the level of the football program and then looked to see if the stage of development my daughter is at ties into their programs plans.

We didn’t take the highest offer either; our decisions were based purely on our daughters needs as a student and athlete. A full scholarship should cover tuition, room and board and the cost of books needed for course work.

My daughter has a full scholarship, she leaves in July/August 2011 to study at and play for a division 1 university. She’s over the moon and about to realise a dream she has held since she started playing football at 12 years old. Her first junior coach plays and studies in the USA and my daughter has always wanted to do the same.

Coaches are already looking two and three years ahead in the USA so the earlier you start the better chance you have of securing the right scholarship for your son or daughter. My daughter was lucky the right program for her was one of her preferred choices starting this autumn but we would have waited twelve months had the offer only been for next year. Do not rush into this, it’s too important to get wrong, think long and hard, I can’t stress that enough.

It’s not rocket science but you do need to do a lot of reading and check all of the information you are given before you make decisions. If your son or daughter wants it badly enough then you can make it a reality without having to find silly amounts of money up front and leaving them with big student loan debts.

Even having to pay for airfare and insurance my child will be 14 grand less in debt than her peers at UK universities. It’s just a crying shame the government, who promote education for all can’t see the opportunity it is denying hundreds of young people annually by being so unwilling to have an original thought when it comes to processing student loan applications.

How can they think that getting into 30K+ debt here in the UK is better than getting into 16K’s worth of debt by studying overseas? If that’s the kind of rational taught at Oxford and Cambridge my kid is defiantly better off going to study in the USA anyway.

Please bear in mind they call is soccer in the USA, I quickly learnt to put  ‘Soccer scholarship ‘ in the subject line of out going emails when I had one coach email me back saying that despite being 5’6 and a solid 135 lbs he felt my daughter was too small for his football team even as a wide receiver!

Some coaches it appears have a good sense of humour.

My next mission should I choose to accept it is to make sure we secure the funding for four years worth of travel and insurance.

That folks is a whole new set of issues to look at and overcome and should we manage with the help of friends, family, loans and bursaries I’ll probably feel compelled to write and let you all know how that worked out too.