I don't disagree that putting money in a good college fund would certainly yield better financial results than hoping for an athletic scholarship. My DD was fortunate in tha she received some DII scholarship money to play softball. She got 6K as a freshman but got 11.5K in academic on top of that. So she's getting about 45% of her tuition/room&board paid for at a pretty nice private college. My guess is that over all the years she played, we spent over 20K paying for all of her softball related activities so if she gets the entire 24K for the 4 years we didn't make any money doing it. The big picture is that she stayed out of trouble. We had something we all enjoyed doing together and she went to college and absoluetly loves being involved in the experience at college while getting a great education.