How to Get an Athletic Scholarship

There are tons of scholarships for athletes out there, and some of them are harder to get than others. Most people know about the Got Milk? Scholarship, but few realize just how many financial aid programs there are for aspiring college athletes. If you are thinking about playing a sport in college, you may qualify for one of these awards. The key in getting one of these scholarships is to know where to look and how to apply for one. The tips below should walk you through the basic process so you can obtain all the money you need to pay for your education.

Common Requirements for Athletic Scholarships

Every scholarship is different when it comes to the application requirements, so you need to look over the requirements for an award you want to apply for before you spend a ton of time on it. Here are some of the most common things scholarship committees look for in award winners:

• Academic merit (good grades, high test scores, etc.)
• Financial need (not always)
• Athletic abilities
• Leadership qualities
• Community service participation
• Extracurricular activities

Athletic scholarships are about a lot more than being able to play sports well. It's nice to have great player stats, but scholarship committees want to see more than that. They want to sponsor people who can be role models in the community, so you are going to need more than a fast run and a good pair of hands to get something like this. The more well-rounded you are, the better off you will be.

Where to Find Athletic Scholarships

Finding athletic scholarships is not a tricky process because there are a ton of them out there. If there is a certain school that you want to play college ball for, the easiest thing to do is to contact them about your scholarship opportunities. If you just want a general scholarship that could be used at any school, you could look through a site like Scholarships.com or FastWeb.com. Those sites provide great references to scholarships you may be able to qualify for. Talk to a financial aid adviser in the college you want to go to, and he or she should be able to point you in the right direction.

How to Apply for Athletic Scholarships

You should be able to complete most of your applications online, but there may be a few of them that have to be filled out on paper or in person. Some athletic scholarships require short essays, and others are awarded purely based on grades and skills. If you do have to write an essay for an application, it will probably be about how sports have made your life better and what you could do with financial aid for college. You just have to read the prompt that you get from the application, and then you can create the essay that fits the needs of the scholarship.

With the sheer amount of athletic scholarships available in the world, there is no reason for you to avoid applying for them. You have the potential to pay for your college education if you just look around at your options. Work on your academic skills as much as you work on your athletic abilities, and then you will have a much better chance at securing the aid that you need. With a little effort in the right places, you should have no trouble finding the money you need for college.

Is Golf Really All That Hard?

A lot of people try to play golf because they assume it is going to be really easy. All you have to do is hit a ball into a hole. How hard can that be? There is a lot more to keep in mind about golf than just hitting a ball in a hole. As much as I want to make a Tiger Woods joke at this point, I'll refrain from doing so. Let's just stick to the facts. I wanted to explore some of the many thought processes that actually go into playing golf to show you, the reader, what it takes to do well in this sport. Read on to see just how hard golf really is.

Gone with the Wind

Wind becomes a problem in most sports because it blows a ball off course. Playing tennis in the wind is incredibly difficult, and golf is no different. When the winds come, they blow your ball in directions that it is not supposed to go in. That can cause you to hit something completely off course, especially over a long distance. Seeing that wind is prevalent almost every day, you have to adjust your hitting and putting strategies to make up for whatever the wind is doing at some point in time.

'Erbody in Da Club Getting' Tipsy

Every golf club has a different purpose, and you have to know which club to use to do whatever you want to do. One club is meant to help your ball travel a long distance, and another is meant to help you hit a ball out of the sand. Then you have the putter, which is meant to be used for very short distances. You can get as complicated as you want with all of this, but the point is that you have to know what different clubs do and how to use them properly. This can make the sport of golf very confusing, very quickly.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

The way in which you hit the ball will also have an impact on how successfully it travels. If you hit with too much force, you could overshoot the hole. If you don't hit with enough force, you could end up using a lot of extra strokes just to make it to the hole. It takes years of practice to actually get good at golf, unless you happen to be really lucky. You have to learn the balance of strength, speed, and direction to get the ball to go exactly where you want it to go. This is more difficult than you may think.

This Land Is Your Land

The landscaping on a golf course will have a huge influence on the way your ball acts. You have to think about hills, valleys, sand pits, ponds, and other physical features that you may come across on the course. All of these features will determine where your ball goes and how close it gets to the hole. One small little pebble could completely transform your stroke for the worse. You can't correct any of this. You just have to learn to work around it.

Long story short, golf is not as easy as it looks. You may play a mean miniature golf, but it takes a seasoned pro to do well in the real deal. All you can do is practice at the sport and see if you are any good. If not, there are plenty of other sports around the world that you could look into. You just have to open your mind.

How to Play Tennis – The Basics

Tennis is a complex sport, and it is one that you may not be able to learn on a whim. Most people spend years trying to perfect their tennis swings before they can actually consider themselves good at the game. I am far from an expert in tennis, but I do at least have a grasp on the basics. Thus I thought it may be nice to provide you with a basic guide to the sport so you can practice it on your own. Here is a brief guide explaining how to play tennis so you could enjoy the fun this sport has to offer.

Rules

The basic rule of tennis is that you have to hit a ball that comes to you before it bounces a second time. The player hitting the ball must make sure that the ball makes it over the net without bouncing, and he or she must keep the ball in between the boundary lines. The inner set of lines is used for singles (one person playing one other person), and the outer lines are used for doubles (two people playing two other people). Serves must happen behind the back line, and they must land on the opposite side of the next. These balls must hit within the box diagonal from the server, and they cannot touch the net.

There are several different kinds of wins in tennis. There is a match win, a set win, and a game win. A game is made up of several set, and a set is made up of several matches. The number of sets and matches in a game will depend on the rules of the area at the time of play. One player serves the ball for an entire match before giving it to someone else to serve. Players must change sides after every other round of play so that no one player gets an unfair advantage. Serving also alternates from one corner to the next every round. You can see how this can get really complicated really quickly.

Scoring

Scoring in tennis is a little odd, especially if you aren't familiar with the game. Every round of play has four possible scores: 0 (love), 15, 30, and 40. Every time a person fails to hit a ball before the second bounce, the other person moves up in the score. If the score was 15:30, the score could then move to 30:30 or 15:40, depending on who hit the scoring ball. If a player fails to get the ball over the net, the points go to the other player.

If one person is at 40 point and the other person is not, the 40 point player can win the round by winning the next play. In other words, you have to score one more time beyond the 40 point to win a match. If there comes a time when you reach the score of 40:40, you go into deuce. That means that the winner of the match will have to get two scores in a row. The first person to score gets what is known as an "advantage." If he or she scores a second time, he or she wins the game. If the other person scores, everything goes back to normal. Then another set of two will be needed in order to win.

If you play this sport a bit and you find out you're really good at it, you may be able to land some athletic scholarships in honor of your talents. If you aren't the best player in the world, don't worry. There are plenty of people out there who just aren't cut out for tennis. Hopefully now you have a rough idea of how to play the sport so you can use it for your fitness and entertainment.

Animal Fighting as a Sport? WTF?

I have been watching a little too much of Animal Cops on Animal Planet lately, so forgive me if this article seems slightly off topic. I have noticed that animal fighting seems to be an increasingly popular sport in the US, and I'm not totally sure why. People fight roosters, dogs, and bulls against one another for sheer entertainment, and I have a genuine probably with it. This article is entirely devoted to my disdain for this supposed sport that is nothing more than animal cruelty at its finest. Read on if you are a little peeved about all of this yourself.

A Look at Animal Fighting

Animal fights usually involve animals that are naturally aggressive, like pit bulls, roosters, and bulls. People train these animals to hate other members of their own species, and then they put two aggressive animals in a ring and watch them fight one another. Viewers place bets on the animals just like they would on a fight between humans or anything else along those lines. The people running the right rake in extra money for each bet placed, and that's how they fuel the establishment.

The criminals in charge of animal fighting operations have to work under cover because dog and cock fighting are illegal in the US. They typically have locations in the middle of nowhere where most patrol officers don't venture. They keep their actions incredibly secretive, and they breed their own fighters to prevent others from getting suspicious. You can think of them as drug dealers of sorts, especially since most of them do in fact sell illegal drugs at their establishments. As a whole, they find ways to make money by putting innocent animals in fights against one another – just for fun.

The rinks for animal fights are usually made out of old carpets and particle board to provide a barrier between the aggressive animals and the humans watching them in the crowd. These animals usually do not have a problem with humans because they are trained to hate other animals. Pit bulls, for instance, are often great with people, but they can be trained to tear each other apart. Some breeders make their dogs so aggressive that they have to tie the females down in order for the males to be able to mate with them. The whole setup for animal fights is absolutely appalling, and it is not something I would ever wish on any animal. This is far from a sport if you ask me.

The Aftermath of Animal Fighting

A lot of animal fighting operations are discovered through the efforts of animal patrol officers and law enforcement officials, but there are still plenty of them that never get unveiled. Some cops will go under cover posing as people who want to join in on the betting for the fights because they have to have physical evidence of the fights occurring in order to incriminate the men and women involved. If they are never able to get that evidence, the fights – unfortunately – get to continue.

For the fighting setups that are discovered, most of the animals involved must be put to sleep after they are rescued from their owners. They are too aggressive to be put in the hands of strangers at that point, so they have to be euthanized to end their suffering and protect the safety of other animals along the way. This can all be prevented if we put a stop to animal fighting in the first place. Take a stand against this problem in your community, and let's see if we can get this "sport" to fade away in near future.