Richard Estrada is standing on the sidelines at the Peninsula-West Torrance football game, watching intently as the young players on the field run and pass and butt heads on the line. He's holding a clipboard, making notations on a form after every play, but he's actually holding much more than that in his hands.
What Estrada is holding are the dreams and futures of young men.
Estrada is a professional high school football scout. Every year he will watch 40 to 50 high school football games in the South Bay and throughout Los Angeles on behalf of an Orange County-based company called Para-Dies Scouting, assessing the players' abilities, attitudes and potential.
His reports and those from company scouts in other Southern California areas will be assembled and sold to colleges and universities for $1,500 to $2,000 a copy, giving them an overview of what's available in the Southern California high school football market.
For anxious high school football players who will be waiting for those college football coaches to call, a thumbs up or a thumbs down from Estrada could be a deciding factor. Each notation he makes on that clipboard can help advance--or demolish--a high school boy's dreams of getting a "ride"--that is, a full college scholarship.
It's big business, this quest to get a scholarship, not just in football but in other sports, for girls as well as boys. Full or partial scholarships are available in about two dozen sports, and since implementation in the 1970s of Title IX, which seeks to balance expenditures on women's sports with men's, the growth of women's athletics scholarships has been explosive. In 1991, the last year for which figures are available, the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. reported that about 90,000 college athletes were receiving about $468 million in full and partial scholarships--almost a third of them to women--from 540 NCAA Division I and II colleges and universities.
Although the numbers are large, the size of the athletic scholarship pie actually is small, given the huge demand for a slice of it. No one knows just how many high school athletes--and their parents--entertain dreams of getting an athletic ride. But insiders estimate that no more than 10% of high school athletes qualify for athletic scholarships, either full or partial.
