Fields of Learning Scholarship

Scholarship Sponsored by Fields of Learning

Mission

To encourage high school students from Ohio and other states to appreciate and write about their learning experiences related to high school football, and to reward as many of them as possible with financial aid for continuing education.

Rules for essays:

• The length of the essay is to be minimum 700  maximum 1500 words.
• It is to be a true story told in your own words. You should write it yourself, but it is OK to receive suggestions from other people and/or artificial intelligence (AI).
• It is not to contain any language that defames or casts a bad light on anyone else. For example, instead of saying that the assistant coach was a jerk, consider writing that he was nobody’s favorite assistant coach

Rules for submission:

• Include your name and high school at the top of the essay.
• We will only accept one essay from a student per school year.
• Feel free to submit an essay each year during your high school career.
• All essays become the sole property of Fields of Learning
• The deadline for submissions for the current period is March 31, 2025.

Guidelines for creating a winning essay:

Based on over 20 years of receiving and evaluating essays we have noticed certain patterns and guidelines emerging around which essays have a good chance of winning and which don’t.  Please consider these when submitting – and give yourself a real chance to score a win.

The five tenets of evaluating an essay are:

• Quality of content
• Quality of writing
• Creativity (including humor)
• Depth of the Lesson Brought Forward
• Grammatical considerations (spelling, punctuation, paragraph, and sentence structure)

The essays are judged solely on their own merit.  It does not matter if you are a good student or are active in your school/community,  It does not matter anything about your sexual orientation or whether or not you ever played football.  

The minimum word count is 700 words.  Don't bother submitting anything with less words than that.  It takes at least that length to develop a story that becomes a winner.  The max is 1500 words.  Anything beyond that would likely strike us as rambling.

The best essays are ones with a deep, personal experience and lesson.  It is really good that communities rally around winning football teams, but we get lots of those and they are upstaged by ones where a personal lesson and your "voice" comes through.

We like details about important games and plays, but be careful not to fill the bulk of the essay with play-by-play and miss the opportunity to develop the lesson narrative.

We recommend that you have someone proofread and even offer suggestions to improve the essay.  There have been many where we said "Great idea, but I wish he/she had asked someone to proofread it". Teachers, parents, counselors and friends can provide good input.  

The essay should be your own work, not generated by AI-type tools, but there is nothing wrong with using tools to gather information, find quotations you can use, or to provide ideas for how to structure the essay.