These are some of the most popular and hardest sports of all time, including Baseball, Soccer, Football, and Basketball. Photo collage courtesy of freshman Mallory Cushing.
San Luis Obispo High School offers 23 sports for students to participate in, but which one is most difficult to go pro in?
More than eight million students in the US, at collegiate and high school levels, take part in school sport programs; including many SLOHS students.
To “go pro” simply means to play professionally and for money.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), is an organization dedicated to the well-being and lifelong success of college athletes. The NCAA conducted research on the hardest sport to play professionally based on the amount of NCAA students that made it pro.
The sport with the most NCAA participants is college football (77,203 students). In the National Football League draft, where players are drafted from college to play in the NFL, there were 259 NCAA students drafted in 2023. This means that the NCAA to professional percentage is 1.5. Football is one of the most technical and popular sports, making it extremely difficult to go pro. With college football comes college cheerleaders!
“I want to go pro in cheer because I love the feeling of performing in front of everybody, and the skills I would do would be super fun. I would like to compete professionally for a college and compete against other schools in competitions,” said freshman Jillian Davis.
0.5 percent of collegiate softball players made it to a professional league; this is compared to the much higher 5.1 percent of Baseball athletes that make it pro. Although softball has the lowest percentage of all sports, there are only four thousand one-hundred and ten NCAA participants and not many professional softball leagues for players to go to. This makes it extremely difficult to find a professional team that players are good enough for. Baseball took six-hundred and fourteen draft picks (the most out of any sport), with four-hundred and forty-four NCAA players drafted in 2023. Baseball has a 5.1 NCAA to professional percentage.
“I would like to go pro in soccer because I like the collaboration and the sportsmanship. It’s also really fun. I definitely want to play college soccer, preferably a college in California on the coast like Stanford. Playing in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) would be really great,” said freshman Willa Scott.
One of the most popular sports at SLOHS is soccer. Worldwide, soccer is the most popular sport to play and watch. Out of the 29,959 NCAA women’s soccer participants in 2023, the National Women’s Soccer League took 48 draft picks, selecting 47 NCAA athletes. On the other hand, men’s soccer had 27,203 NCAA participants in 2023, with 87 Major League Soccer draft picks. Men’s soccer has a 1.4 NCAA to pro percentage, while women’s soccer has a 0.7 percentage.
Lastly, women’s and men’s Basketball have similar NCAA to professional percentages with women’s Basketball at 0.9 percent and men’s Basketball at 1.1 percent. In 2023, the National Basketball Association had fifty-eight draft picks, with forty-six of those being NCAA students. The Women’s National Basketball Association took thirty-six draft picks, with 33 of those being NCAA students.
All and all, if SLOHS students have aspirations to go pro, hard work and dedication are key, especially if they want to go pro in any of the sports above.
Source: www.ncaa.org
