Mythic Quest - The Impossible Challenge of Making it to the Pros

If your experience with youth sports sometimes feels more like a pay-to-win adventure game that has real world consequences, you are not alone. And not alone in harboring suspicion that the game itself is unconquerable!

Those hopes and dreams are a lifetime in the making with many of us imprinted from watching Wide World of Sports, the Olympics, or the Little League World Series. In 2025, we are saturated with highlights, stories, and clips of impossible achievements that seem to happen each and every day. Due to a variety of pressures, clinging to those dreams of a career in sports are most certainly protracted today.

Kids now grow up in an environment with an emphasis on sports as a track to college. With the advent of NIL money, there are now real financial considerations and impacts that are altering the entire landscape of NCAA sports and predictably moving into high school.

Understanding the numbers, whatever your feelings are about the system, is a great way to ground expectations. So we are going to look at some numbers and some funnels which point to playing pro sports as a dream, not a plan.

It may feel like every high school has a tale of some athlete who made it to the pros. But that really isn’t the case. Here you can look at all the high schools that have graduated an NBA or ABA pro player. This year Maine celebrated the #1 draft pick Cooper Flagg but he played only a single high school season in Maine at Nokomis Regional High School before transferring to Montverde Academy in Florida. Nokomis has had no graduates make the NBA (so close!) Montverde, a whopping 23! Curiously, despite a population of just 1.5 million, Maine has sent 10 players to the pros — and oddly enough all from the same high school (Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield).

And if you follow the money, a basketball coach at a typical Maine high school might make $50,000/year while at Monteverde the position pays close to $300,000.

For the big, stark picture, the funnel snapshot for boys basketball players looks something like this:

Youth 4.5 million —> High School 540,000 —> College 32,000 —> NBA 540

For girls, the path to the WNBA is even slimmer with

High School 380,000 —> WNBA 144

Given this already impossible funnel, we can layer on that players not in a basketball academy or a high school with the attractive gravity of a pro track record have even longer odds. If those dreams haven’t been reset, go ahead and check the wingspan of any elite high school or college player because if it isn’t a few inches greater than the player’s height, they won’t be in the pros. The last NBA player with short arms was JJ Redick who had an NBA 41.5% career 3-point percentage.

If you want a great deep dive on nature vs. nurture in elite performers read The Sports Gene.

Ok, maybe pro sports is just simply the romantic delusion of being young or the myopia of a certain type of parent. Let’s look a bit deeper at college.

The calculus for college sports has some nuance. Above is a depiction of the most popular sports. A few weeks ago we got into the weeds about women’s rugby in college and many of the same general observations hold true. At the very top you have truly exceptional athletes increasingly concentrating in academy or specialized high schools. They are jockeying for spots on top D1 teams and now NIL deals.

Much of the youth sports boom of the last 15 years is often seen as a response to the competitive nature of college admissions and there is a large cohort of talented athletes who are looking for the differentiator to gain acceptance into a “top” school. This moving target reflects a new breadth of “top” schools that often use sports as a selling point. With this emphasis on sports programs, recruiting has been pushed up and many college roster spots can be filled with commitments early in the junior year of high school. For those looking for financial aid, that too is part of the dance and also in flux. New NIL regulations let schools participating have no limit on scholarships for their teams but are feeling the impact of roster size changes. It is messy and we’ll try to break all of that down in a future Playtime.

But the clear takeaway is very few high school athletes go on to play in college.

If your teen is possibly in the 1 in 20 and you want your own research project, take a look at some of rosters for any given college sport and you can get a feel for both demographics and often physical characteristics of athletes. For example, the defending champion Penn State Women’s Volleyball team has 17 players, only 7 are under 6’ tall (none below 5’6”) and the other 10 are 6’2”-6’6”. Glance at the Harvard Men’s Squash Team and you may note that just 3 of the 11 players are from the United States.

All that said, exceptions to rules make for great stories and in the immortal words of Walt Disney, "If you can dream it, you can do it."

The US Women’s Rugby Team failed to advance in the Rugby World Cup losing a tie-breaker to Australia.

High School Girls Flag Football appears to be the next big thing. Marin County (CA) recently commenced their first conference season ever.

And the IAAF World Championships of Track and Field are happening in Tokyo. If you think junior year of high school is packed and pressure filled, Cooper Lutkenhaus, 16 of Justin, Texas, is in Japan skipping school to compete in the 800m. About 45 miles from Fort Worth, Justin has a population of 6,000. As the U18 record holder, he has already beaten the best time of Fort Worth/TCU star and multi-time US Champion Khadevis Robinson who retired in 2013.

That’s a wrap!