College Careers Await Several Southwest Athletes

For all of the hype surrounding the five-star high school football player and the six-foot nine-inch forward, the vast majority of kids who go on to participate in athletics at the collegiate level are a lot like Southwest High School’s Allison Adams and John Pitsenbarger—good athletes and good students.

They will compete away from the limelight, rarely playing in sold-out arenas. Adams and Pitsenbarger are classic examples of the NCAA slogan: “Most of us go pro in something other than sports.”

Adams will continue as a volleyball player at the University of Mary in Bismarck, ND and Pitsenbarger will go from a very good Southwest Lakers boys soccer team to play at Dominican University in River Falls, IL, a northwest suburb of Chicago.

Adams was all conference her senior year while Pitsenbarger was second team All-State in soccer.

Both will be off to what could be called “larger small schools," the University of Mary has an enrollment of about 3,000 and Dominican has approximately 4,000.

University of Mary teams compete at the Division II level of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and Dominican competes at the Division III level. 

Ayrton Scott, a football player, will continue on at North Dakota School of Science, a junior college in Wahpeton. Several other Southwest students are likely to play at Division II colleges.

“I’d like to major in either marketing or management,” Adams says.

 Pitsenbarger will leave behind teammates who accomplished a lot in 2010.

 “We were 20-1 and the loss was to Apple Valley in the state finals.”

 The Southwest volleyball team was 24-5.

Both also expect to play their same positions in college—Adams as a middle blocker and Pitsenbarger as a mid fielder.

Other schools contacted both athletes. In Adams case, St. Mary’s in Winona expressed interest. And for Pitsenbarger, the University of Vermont was an option.

Adams and Pitsenbarger are symbolic of the large majority of high school athletes who go onto college sports. Of all the kids who play high school sports in the U.S., roughly less than 10 percent continue to compete once at the collegiate level. The Lakers going on to do so will become part of some 380,000 who compete at about 1,000 schools.

These figures do not include those who, like Scott, will continue at least for one to two years at the junior college level or who are at institutions that are members of the other sanctioning body at the college level, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA).

The Southwest athletes are probably not thinking about all those statistics. They're just getting ready to graduate on to a whole host of new adventures in their lives.