I've often heard that hundreds of girls' golf scholarships go unclaimed each year for lack of qualified applicants, but apparently this is an urban legend. "Absolutely false," said Dean Frischknecht, who for 20 years has written the Ping American College Golf Guide. He also oversees www.collegegolf.com, a subscription Web site that is the bible for high-schoolers hoping to play on a college team. "Families by the thousands are hammering away at college coaches to get golf scholarships. There's no way they're going to go unused."

But it is true that girls have better odds than boys do. Only a third as many girls as boys play competitive golf in high school and on the junior-tournament circuits (the same gender ratio as for adults), yet there are substantially more total golf scholarships available for girls.

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Just how good does a girl have to be to win one? By Mr. Frischknecht's reckoning, any girl capable of breaking 85 most of the time in tournaments on a 6,000-yard course (which is longer than the 5,400-yard set-ups most commonly used in high school) should attract at least a partial golf scholarship somewhere, including two-year junior colleges. Girls capable of posting tournament scores in the upper 70s can usually land scholarship money at midlevel Div. I schools or at Div. II schools.

But unless they can regularly break 75 on 6,000-yard courses, girls shouldn't even think about applying to elite programs like those at Duke or UCLA. Those schools recruit almost exclusively from among the stars of national competitions like those run by the American Junior Golf Association. Winning scores there often are under par, and even 75-shooters finish far down the list.