This article, bumped off the top of the NY Times most-emailed list by the Spitzer story, deserves a lot of attention. So many adolescents devote their energy to sports on the belief that it's their ticket to college, when in reality the number of college scholarships that are passed around are far fewer than the number of college athletes. In this day and age of lottery scholarships, it's a lot easier to get a scholarship with a 3.0 GPA, and it might just be a better idea to spend your high school years studying rather than traveling to elite competitions.

The other interesting part of the article is the fact that scholarship money is rarely apportioned equally among athletes on a team. This is mind-boggling to me. I can't think of any easier way to insert discord into the locker room than to give the athletes differently sized scholarships; I've spoken with former athletes who have confirmed that this does actually affect team chemistry. While I'm not likely to be a college coach anytime soon, I'd advise anyone who is to avoid giving your athletes reasons to hate each other.