For all those student-athletes who have achieved some success at the high school level, I have a bit of good news:  Even if you can’t defy gravity like Michael Jordan or smack a little white ball like Tiger Woods, you can still score a sweet sports scholarship.

To see why this is possible, let’s first take a look at the numbers:  Each year, more than 126,000 students at the NCAA Division I and II levels receive athletic scholarships totaling around $1 billion.  Because only about 5 percent of these scholarship recipients are the so-called “blue-chippers”—the slam-dunk recruits we often hear about in the national media—this leaves nearly 120,000 scholarships during any given year for those student-athletes who may not be standout stars.