The Athletic-Academic Connection: Part 2

Good Grades = More Scholarship Opportunities

The NCAA has spent the past twenty-five years creating recruiting rules for four specific purposes: 

1. To create a level playing field among the three divisions
2. To react to rules abuses by member institutions and coaches
3. To ease the pressure placed on prospects by coaches
4. To improve the academic responsibility and raise the graduation rate of its student-athletes

A little history, if you will.  There was a time when athletes at many colleges were only required to carry and pass a bare minimum number of hours to remain eligible to participate in athletics.  They needed to have taken and earned passing grades for as few as nine hours per semester.  With the exception of the most stringent academic institutions, there existed few academic requirements for athletes, including the type classes athletes were required to pass.  In the old days, college athletes did not have to demonstrate progress toward attaining a degree to play.

Flash forward to the present day.  Firm restrictions are now ensconced in the NCAA which indelibly connect an athlete to academics in both high school and college, legitimizing the term student-athlete.  The bottom line?  At some point, to become a college athlete, you must study and produce grades to play.

On the front end of recruiting, prospects must meet strict academic requirements to become eligible to participate in NCAA Division I and II as a college freshman.  While initial eligibility rules governing the NAIA and NJCAA affiliated schools are not as limiting for prospects, they too have raise their academic requirements over the years.  Knowing these requirements as a freshman in high school is essential because getting and staying on the correct academic path is necessary to eventually qualify to play college sports. 

On the back side of recruiting, much has happened to athletic programs which have squeezed them into a corner.  On one side are the NCAA initial eligibility and ongoing academic requirements which must be met or exceeded for student-athletes to become and remain eligible.  On another side are the limits on scholarships permitted per sport by the NCAA.  And, finally, there are budgetary constraints which individual institutions place on their athletic departments and coaches. 

Put all this together and the ideal situation for an NCAA coach is to find, evaluate and recruit prospects with great high school academic records (and some need-based federal money) – records which will earn the student-athlete a lot of free money and allow the coach to insert a minimal amount of his or her athletic scholarship money to help make college affordable for the prospect and parents.

In short, the higher the grades and test scores a prospect delivers, the less money an NCAA coach has to fork out in scholarship aid.  Therefore, the better your grades, the more coaches which will, and can, be attracted to you as a prospect.  Higher grades, more coaches.  Lower grades, fewer coaches.  It’s really as simple as that.