Originally Posted by Anonymous
The Chances of a High School Lacrosse Player, Playing Lacrosse in College is 11.7% ... better odds in fencing ...

The following are the chances of high school girls competing at the college level by sport:
High School College % competing
School Sponsored Sport Girls Women in College *
Lacrosse 74,993 8,784 11.7%
BOTC is not sure that the High School participation counts and collegiate participation counts are the right prism through which one should view the chances of playing in college. While it says that college count is 11.7% of the High School count, the likelihood is that the better lacrosse players who are part of the Northeast club scene will have a much better than 1-in-9 chance of playing college lacrosse.

If you return to the link that BOTC posted, you will see that your figure of 8,784 collegiate women's players exactly matches our data.

The problem here is that the 8,784 players includes everything : NCAA Division I, Division II, Division III, NAIA, NJCAA, and unaffiliated divisions. So, if one is just looking at NCAA numbers, you find the following :

NCAA Division I : 2,536
NCAA Division II : 1,546
NCAA Division III: 4,192

Our point here is that only 4,082 of the 8,784 are scholarship eligible.

When you go one step further, you find that there are only 1,116 total women's NCAA Division I scholarships for everyone and 663 NCAA Division II scholarships available.

That makes 1,776 scholarships in total being spread across 4,082 players. If everything was equal and fully funded, that would mean that the average player is competing for 43%. However as we know, elder classmen will receive increasing awards in general which means entry students are receiving substantially less.

The bottom line is that the numbers should not be looking at all High School players compared to the collegiate numbers. Instead, look at the number of Division I/II positions related to scholarship aspirations.