You haven't accounted for one core aspect of competitive sports, which is that huge advantage is gained from being able to compete at a higher level early. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the effect of birth month on players' likelihood of making the NHL: because youth leagues are structured around ages, players of the "same" age who were born a few months earlier relative to each cutoff gives them a statistical advantage in size and development. This means that they are more often initially selected as the best, and consequently end up competing at a higher level earlier, and so their progression occurs more rapidly, and so on in a positive feedback loop, until by the time they're an adult they actually are better.

The same effect translates to adults. Even if an undrafted NCAA basketball player was given access to exactly the same training facilities and support as a drafted NBA player, they'd still have an inevitable disadvantage from the fact that the NBA player gets to learn by actually playing at the NBA level. There's no substitute for that experience, or for stronger competitive experience generally at any stage in your career.

So no, it isn't enough just to work just as hard. Unless you have enough talent at whatever level you're at to compete with the others who are best at that level (which is inevitably a restricted pool, since there are only so many best players and opportunities for them to play), you'll never get equally valuable competitive experience. Without that experience, you're very unlikely to ever catch up to people who are getting more and more of it every day, no matter how much drive you have.