Schools have money to give out, so getting a scholarship to play college basketball isn't as crazy as it sounds. Title IX has opened the door for more women to play collegiate sports than ever before.

So how do you land this money?

Well, first and foremost, you need to be good. There are over 425,000 high schoolers playing girl's basketball and we're sure a lot of them would like to play in college (source).

Second, you need to study even harder. To play college ball, you first need to get into college. That's an underrated step. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to go chasing an Ivy League team if you prefer playing video games to reading literary classics.

NCAA basketball is what's known as a "head-count sport," meaning that a given program has a fixed number of full scholarships it can award its players. At the Division-I level, that number is fixed at 15, whereas D-II has only 10.

NAIA I programs have up to 11 full scholarships available, while junior colleges have up to 15. If a D-III school comes a-callin', find a part-time job because they don't offer scholarships (source). We wish you the best in being a student-athlete-sales associate.

Also, those numbers refer to the amount of scholarships available for the entire team. So if a girl is trying to play her way into a D-I school, there will likely only be enough scholarships for three or four incoming freshmen.

Like the unfortunate side effects of trickle-down economics and the dwindling population of pandas, there will be even fewer scholarships for freshmen at the D-II level (source).

The moral of the story is: take science and math classes seriously. They'll come in handy.