Apparently collegiate baseball has been a source of contention for the NCAA because they have made some drastic changes to how rosters are put together…
 
In 2008, the NCAA somehow decided that D1 baseball needed its own recruiting guidelines in the form of roster caps and athletic scholarship distribution. High level D1 baseball has always had challenges; one being that there is no transfer penalty like there is for football or basketball by having to sit out a year, and two, the June Major League baseball draft left coaches uncertain what players were coming to their college as freshman or coming back to their team after the draft.
 
The new NCAA rules state the following: D1 baseball rosters cannot exceed 35 players. No more than 27 players can receive athletic scholarship money each of whom must receive a minimum of a 25% scholarship. Players transferring from D1 to D1 must sit out a year (like football, basketball and hockey.) Furthermore, if a player is on the fall roster and receiving aid, and leaves the team for any reason, that spot cannot be replaced. Furthermore, coaches cannot bring in players for the spring season that were not eligible to play during the fall.
 
This is a problem for D1 baseball programs with only 2 or 3 scholarships per team. If a coach has 3 scholarships, he has to divide that money to no more than 12 players. (3 scholarships divided into 12 individual twenty five percent scholarships.)
 
In the past a college baseball coach could divide that money to any number of players at his choosing. In this new scenario, 23 players may receive NO AID at all for a team with only 3 scholarships to offer!
 
Now you might be thinking what D1 college baseball teams only have 2 or 3 scholarships? And the answer is probably many of them. There are many small D1 colleges that offer baseball that will not have 11.7 scholarships to offer as well as many State schools that simply don’t have the budget that some private schools might have. Baseball is not a revenue generating sport, so for a school to offer athletic scholarships for all sports, they either need the money to do so, or need to justify the loss of money as a benefit for the school. Football and basketball at the big schools bring in money for not only football and basketball, but for all sports. That money also filters into other departments that don’t necessarily include athletics. A school that makes millions of dollars through their football and basketball teams may/will/can/might provide athletic scholarships at the NCAA maximum for many/most/all sports.
 
With that being said, it is worth noting that there are only 119 Division 1A football programs throughout the country, but there are over 300 Division 1 baseball programs. So that is 180+ programs that don’t have millions of dollars of “football money” coming in to fund their baseball program or any of the 20 other non-revenue generating sports at the college level not named football, basketball, or hockey. I won’t even get into the expense of running a D1 football program right now, but for many schools, the money is probably covering their expenses. The schools that are dripping in money usually have their own TV deals or additional sponsorships. Think Ohio State or Texas!
 
This can pose a problem for college baseball programs with only a few scholarships to offer for their entire team. In the past if a coach had 3 baseball scholarships, he could divide that money how he saw fit. You might not think giving a certain player only a few thousand dollars in scholarship money isn’t a big deal, but if that player is evaluating 3 or 4 schools with the same tuition price, getting $3,000 in aid might seem like a lot of money to a parent that is writing the tuition checks.
 
Under the new scenario, let’s use a school that has 3 scholarships and costs $40,000 in tuition. Since scholarships are turned into money, you would have $120,000 worth of scholarship money at your disposal. Under the previous rules, a coach could distribute that money any way he wanted to as many players as he wanted to.
 
Now, if you have 3 full scholarships and have to use a minimum of 25% for a player, each scholarship slice is now worth $10,000 each. So under this scenario, the minimum you would receive is $10,000 in scholarship money. The good news is that coaches can offer you any percentage they want over 25%, so you could get 50% or $20,000. The bad news is it has eliminated the ability of the coach being able to attract players that might need a few thousand dollars in aid or even book money for that matter.
 
This challenge grows when you factor into the mix the fact that a college baseball team will have players on the roster currently under scholarship. So a college with 3 total baseball scholarships might have 2 scholarships being used by current team members. Come recruiting time, if the coach has only 1 scholarship to use, he in theory can only offer 4 recruits a piece of that scholarship money. That may make recruiting a player on the fence financially that may have been looking for a few thousand dollars in aid much more difficult to recruit, if you have nothing to offer.
 
It also makes choosing what players receive athletic aid more important. A coach might be able to make a mistake on a player by giving him $3,000 in aid his first year and having that player not pan out athletically. But when you might have to give a kid $10,000 a year, you can expect coaches will be more diligent with whom they recruit.
 
But there isn’t just a problem with colleges that have only a few scholarships to offer. There is a problem with this scenario when a college has the maximum of 11.7 baseball scholarships to offer. If we take the roster maximum for scholarships at 27 players and times that by 25% or .25 which is the minimum scholarship a player must receive, we get a scholarship total of 6.75, a far cry from 11.7. What this means is that a coach might be forced (and I use the word forced carefully) to give a higher percentage of a scholarship to a player whom he might not deem worthy of such a large percentage of scholarship for the sole purpose of meeting his percentage obligations.
 
A more likely scenario is giving 27 players a 43% scholarship which would total roughly 11.7 scholarships. Now, being able to give more scholarship money to players isn’t necessarily a problem. The real problem lies with the fact that a coach has to have 8 players on his team that will receive no athletic aid. If you have a talented baseball player whose family has invested a considerable amount of time and money into his athletic pursuits in high school, it may be harder to procure that player if you have no slices of your 25% scholarship left.
 
There are many pieces to the recruiting puzzle, some of which you cannot always plan for. And each sport will have its own set of unique challenges to that sport. Like we always advise, it is important to start the recruiting process early and have a good understanding of what is required of you and what factors you need to consider for your particular sport.