A type of scholarship offered to students with outstanding sports abilities, who are expected to make a major contribution to their school’s athletic program. Many highly talented athletes are actively recruited and often offered financial and other material inducements to attend a particular school. Too often, then, the focus is only on the sport, with the college education getting insufficient attention; as a result some athletes, who have been passed through school and college on the basis of their athletic ability, find themselves retired in their late 20s and early 30s with few other skills to fall back on, some of them actually being functionally illiterate.