™
Members: enter the password from your welcome email. The True Cost Calculator and Athlete Scorecard stay free for everyone.
THE PLAN THAT SURVIVES THE INJURY.
Every family builds a recruiting plan for the version of the next four years where nothing goes wrong. Then something does. A knee gives out in October of junior year — that is one problem, with its own playbook. The coach who recruited your athlete takes a job in another state — that is a different problem, with a different playbook. The athlete sits in the car after a tournament and quietly says they are done — different again. None of it means the plan failed. It means the plan needed a second half, and almost nobody writes one. This page holds each playbook, separately.
Roughly two million high school sports injuries a year. Here is what they usually are.
Teenage athletes get hurt at about the same rate as professionals. Most injuries are small and heal. The plan below exists for the ones that cost a season.
Ankle sprains are the most common injury at this level. Among sudden injuries, ligament sprains and concussions lead; among overuse injuries, muscle strains and tendonitis. The season-enders are the knees: ACL tears cluster in sports with cutting and jumping — girls’ soccer and boys’ football carry the highest rates, girls tear at higher rates than boys, and roughly four in five high school ACL tears end in surgery. An MCL sprain, by contrast, usually heals without it in about six weeks — which is why step two of the plan below is a written diagnosis, not a guess.
Growth plates are softer than mature bone and injure more easily. Add Osgood-Schlatter (knee pain during growth spurts), Sever’s disease (heel pain), and stress fractures in the shin and foot — overuse injuries, nearly all of them. Pitchers’ elbows and shoulders are the classic case. Year-round single-sport schedules are driving these numbers up, which is exactly why our middle school guidance says play more than one sport and rest between seasons.
Education, not medical advice. Diagnosis and return-to-play decisions belong to your physician.
The first fourteen days decide the next two years.
What happens medically is out of your hands. What happens to the recruiting is not, and the window is short. Coaches do not stop recruiting injured athletes — they stop recruiting athletes they stop hearing from.
{{ m.body }}
The relationship left. The school stayed. Start over — fast.
This is not an injury problem and the injury playbook does not fit it. A verbal offer belongs to the coach who made it, not the school — when the coach leaves, the interest usually leaves too, and nobody calls to tell you. Here is the separate plan.
{{ m.body }}
And what the next move is in each case.
Injury and a coaching change get their own playbooks above. These are the other four we see most. In every one of them the wrong response is silence, and the right response starts with information you can get in a week.
{{ c.body }}
Redshirt, medical hardship, and the five-year clock.
These rules are frequently misunderstood by families and occasionally by high school coaches. The short version is below; the binding version comes from the compliance office at the school in question.
{{ c.body }}
This is education, not a ruling. Eligibility is decided by the NCAA, NAIA, or NJCAA and the individual institution. Get anything that affects a season of competition in writing from a compliance officer before you act on it.
What you can recover, and what is already gone.
When the plan changes mid-season, most families lose money they did not have to lose, simply because nobody asked. Ask in this order.
The outcome this industry pretends does not exist.
Some athletes work through the whole process and conclude they do not want four more years of it. That is not a wasted three years and it is not a failure of the athlete. It is a seventeen-year-old making an informed decision about their own life, which is the entire point of running a real process instead of chasing a logo.
We treat that outcome as a success, and we say so before a family pays us. The financial planning work still applies — arguably more, because now the whole college bill is an academic and aid question. The scholarship money at that point is academic money, and it is usually larger than the athletic money would have been.
Ask it in the car, not at the kitchen table. Ask it once a year starting freshman year, not for the first time in the middle of a crisis. And do not answer it for them, however long the silence gets.
SEE THE FINANCIAL PLANNING SIDE