Average Amount

• Of the NCAA's three divisions of sports competition, only the top two offer athletic scholarships. According to a 2008 analysis by "The New York Times," using previously unsolicited information from the NCAA, the average lacrosse scholarship in Divisions I and II was $8,670 a year for men and $9,685 for women. Note that these averages apply only to the limited subset of players who actually receive lacrosse scholarships. It's not what the "average player" receives. Many players get nothing at all.
  
  

Allotments

• NCAA rules limit how many full scholarships a school can offer to athletes in a particular sport -- but they allow schools to divide those full scholarships into partial scholarships and distribute them to as many players as they want. For example, a full-ride scholarship might equal $30,000 a year, but a school could give one student $10,000, two students $5,000 apiece and five students $2,000 apiece, and all of them together would count as "one" scholarship for NCAA purposes. Under NCAA rules, a Division I school can offer the equivalent of 12.6 men's lacrosse scholarships and 12.0 women's lacrosse scholarships. Division II schools can offer 10.8 men's lacrosse scholarships and 9.9 women's scholarships.
  
  

Breakdown

• Schools aren't actually required to provide a specific number of scholarships in lacrosse or any other sport. The numbers set by the NCAA simply specify the maximum number they can offer. Many offer far fewer. For example, according to LaxPower, an ESPN partner site for lacrosse fans, roughly 100 schools in Divisions I and II have men's lacrosse programs; in the "Times" analysis, all Division I and II schools combined awarded the equivalent of 551 full scholarships. That comes out to fewer than six full scholarships per team. Meanwhile, the limits don't represent the number of scholarships schools can offer to each incoming class, but rather the scholarships available to the entire team -- all players, from freshmen to seniors. A typical college lacrosse roster can have 35 to 50 players. The "Times" found that the average scholarship for a men's lacrosse player amounted to 32 percent of a full scholarship; for women, the average amounted to 36 percent of a full scholarship.
  
  

Availability

• To get a rough estimate of how many high school athletes end up with a sports scholarship, the "Times" took the number of athletes receiving scholarships at Division I and II schools and compared it with the number of athletes who had been playing those sports in high school four years earlier. From a pool of 35,266 boy lacrosse players, just 1,723 men were receiving the equivalent of 551 lacrosse scholarships four years later. From a pool of 26,677 girls players, four years later 1,756 were receiving the equivalent of 630 lacrosse scholarships.