This interactive data visualization shows the odds of a high school athlete making it onto a college team and then going on to play professionally. The end user can choose between male or female athletes and from four different sports including basketball, baseball / softball, soccer, and hockey. After a selection is made, the funnel will update to show the total number of high school athletes, the number of high school athletes that go on to play on a college team, and of those, how many get drafted onto a professional team each year.

This visualization includes major sports in which both males and females have a chance to advance from high school to the top tier league within the US in their respective genders. For this reason, the visualization does not include football. If you are looking for how many high school football players go on to play in college and get drafted to the NFL, there are 1,121,744 boys playing high school football. Of those, 87,256 play in college (1 in 13), and 254 are drafted to the NFL (1 in 4,416 who play in high school; 1 in 344 who play in college).

The data for this visualization was sourced from scholarshipstats.com.

Interactive Data Visualization: What are the Odds of Going Pro in Sports?

Note: Odds of being drafted are slightly lower because, for the sake of simplicity, the data assumes all players drafted played high school and college domestically. This is not necessarily the case, particularly in MLB and the NBA.