Non American here but big sports fan and I hear about D1 athletes and people playing college sports and the NFL draft and was just wanting to know how they all tie in together.
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Former College Football player here. All three systems are separate. It is not at all like Europe where a soccer team will have an academy and train promising youngsters. Most kids simply attend the High School for their school district and try out for the team. If you make the team and play well or show potential, then college coaches will find out about you and start recruiting you to attend their college (assuming you are on track to meet that college’s academic requirements). Then you choose which college to go to. Those same colleges run camps in the summer to train high school players. This can generate a little money for their program and more importantly let them get a look at players they might be interested in. If you aren’t as talented or go unrecruited, you can still try and make the team in college after enrolling as a student. This is known as “walking on”. That’s what I did. If you play well or show potential in college, NFL coaches will hear about you. They will send scouts to your school to watch games and practices. They will also come to “Pro Day” where it’s more of a workout similar to the combine. If all this goes well you might get an invite to the Combine which is where top players are invited to an organized workout for all the teams to see. After this is the NFL Draft, where each team gets 7 picks and they get the player they choose with that pick. Everyone else is an undrafted free agent and some of them get invited to join an NFL team. NFL will start their preseason with around 90 dudes on the roster and cut to 53 before the first game of the regular season. So the odds are pretty bad for guys taken late in the draft and even worse for undrafted free agents.
High school is grade 9-12, the end of secondary school prior to college. Students attend public high schools based on where their house is located or they pay to attend private high schools.
Top high school athletes will move to get to better sports programs or be recruited and given scholarships to play for private high schools. High school sports are broken down by conferences within each state and play up to a state championship. (I’m honestly foggy on high school sports beyond state championships towards a national level).
High school athletes are scouted and top athletes are rated up to a 5 star recruit. Then these kids are offered scholarships by different colleges and universities to play. D1 refers to division 1, the most competitive tier for college sports. But there’s also D2 and D3 schools as well.
After typically 4-5 years of college play, players will elect for the draft. They can elect sooner, but most students play for the full time that they’re eligible to play in college. Some people would elect early to get paid earlier, but not as much now that they can be paid in college for their name, image, and likeness.
So most of the athletes that you see getting drafted are from D1 schools since they play against the highest level of competition and they have film of how they play against other D1 athletes.
That said, it’s not uncommon for D2 athletes seen as freaks of nature or developmental talent to get drafted as well, but it’s typically seen as more of a gamble. As a result, they’re usually drafted in later rounds or picked up after the draft as an undrafted free agent (UDFA). That just means that no NFL team selected them in the draft, but they’re eligible to be signed.
Typically later round draft picks and UDFAs will be on the practice squad or play special teams, with any serious time on offense or defense seen as a great and largely unlikely success. That’s why someone like Brock Purdy (252nd overall pick of the draft) succeeding on the same team that Trey Lance (3rd overall pick of the same draft) failed on was such a fantastical media story. Interestingly, Brock Purdy was on a middle of the road D1-A (FBS) college team while Trey Lance was on arguably the best D1-AA (FCS) team in the country.
Think of it like Harry Potter: High School is Quidditch, College is the Triwizard Tournament, and the NFL Draft is becoming an Auror.
The NFL basically uses college football as its minor league for developing prospects, except they tend to wait to draft players until they’re age 20+ or so.
The NHL on the other hand usually drafts the top prospects at age 18 after seeing how they do in juniors or high school leagues. Some players are good enough to make the NHL team at age 18, and they often jump right in to the pros. Otherwise there is a North American professional minor league (the AHL), lower level overseas pro leagues (like Finland’s Liiga or Sweden’s SHL), they could stay in the juniors, or they could play college hockey to continue developing until they are ready to be a pro.
Idk how basketball or baseball work, to roundout the US big 4 sports.
different for team sports vs individual sports, are you interested in any sport in particular? former foreign Alpine Ski racer holding a US hs and bachelor’s degree
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