College coaches and sports scholarships are like dragons and gold. They protect them zealously. Try to get one of a coaches' scholarships and they will get prickly.

NCAA scholarships (or, for that matter, NAIA scholarships) are few and far between. There is a lot of demand and very little supply. Each year, coaches have just a few Division I athletic scholarships to hand out.

So how do you get yours without coming on to strong? It all comes down to tactfully asking 1 question -- the most important question surrounding college sports scholarships.

Let's start with what you shouldn't do. Any college coach will tell you that the worst approach is to be pushy about sports scholarships. Don't start asking for a scholarship before a coach has had a good chance to learn about you as a person and as an athlete. This example may seem exaggerated, but it happens all the time:

Dear Coach,

My name is Fred and I would like to get a scholarship to play for your team. Please tell me what I have to do.

Sincerely,

Fred

Yikes. With that out of the way, here's what you should do and, most importantly, the 1 Essential Question For Sports Scholarships:

Before you start asking for money, you have to build trust. You have to contact a coach over an extended period and convince him that you are the right player and person for his team. Once you've established that trust, it's time to ask him The Question, which, in reality, is more of a statement:

"Having learned so much about Southern College over the last eight months since I first emailed you, I feel like it's the ideal place for me as a student and as an athlete. My parents and I are trying to figure out the financial dimension of college, so I wanted to get a sense of whether there will be scholarship money available for me."