The New York Times is running an excellent series of articles this week on athletic scholarships under the series title "The Scholarship Divide." The installment published yesterday ("Expectations Lose to Reality of Sports Scholarships") describes the dramatic gap between what athletes and their parents hope to get in the way of athletic scholarships to Division I schools and what is actually available. Here's one of the article's many interesting points: Among men's sports, ice hockey is the best-paying scholarship sport (at, on average, $21,755 per scholarship) and riflery is the worst (at $3,608 per average scholarship). Baseball, however, is second worst ($5,806).
Today's installment in the series ("Recruits Clamor for More from Coaches with Less") examines the competition for athletic scholarships from the standpoint of those who dispense them--the coaches. One of them who is interviewed for the article is Villanova baseball coach Joe Godri. Godri says,
There have been days when you feel like a used-car salesman. I've always been completely honest, but you can't get away from the fact that the process can be crazy. You pump up a kid so much to come to your place, and when he agrees, you say, "O.K., and what I've got for you is 25 percent of your cost to attend here."
And no one believes you, but that's a good Division I baseball scholarship. You have to convince his parents that you're being really fair.
There are a lot of points to be taken away from the series, but one of them is this: When it comes to college scholarships, solid academic skills pay much better than outstanding athletic skills.
2 comments:
Although the data is accurate, it is misleading. The number of team members on a given sport's travel squad vs. the number of scholarships for said team is really the issue here. Football teams at major universities scholarship 85 players, and generally travel with only 55-60. Baseball teams have 11.7 scholarships, and will travel anywhere from 25-30. Basketball travels 12 and has 13 scholarships. The coaches for sports like baseball, soccer, and water polo have to field competitive teams with 1/3 the scholarships as football and basketball if you factor in the number of players on a travel squad. The reason for this should be obvious..football and basketball teams generate revenue, in many cases the entire athletic department budget at large schools. A big reason that baseball scholarships are undervalued is that they are offered at a great many division 2 and NAIA institutions where tuition is much less, and there are no football or ice hockey teams. Conversely, many ice hockey scholarships are given out at Ivy league and more expensive eastern schools. Also, a high percentage of top high school baseball players forego college completely and head straight to rookie ball. This is not the case with football or basketball, whose professional leagues use the NCAA as their de facto minor league systems.
Coach Buss is entirely correct, except the part about Ivy League schools giving scholarships. There is also a case of full time coaching allotments. Baseball is allowed three full time coaches and one part timer to coach all aspects of the game, the same as basketball, who have to deal with 12-15 players.
There is good news though. When I was coaching D1 ball, if we gave one penny to a player on scholarship, EVERY SCHOLARSHIP given to a player by the school, academic, ethnic or religious, was counted against his athletic money. There was also a rule that stated no one in the athletic department could put undue influence on the institution to give scholarship money to scholarship athletes, which never made any sense to me, because it was going to count against their alloted scholarships anyway.
To make up for it, a few years ago the NCAA dropped the Schools' Scholarships from counting against the athletic allotment. So coaches are getting creative in finding money for incoming players, which don't find their way into any studies, which I am sure coaches are fine with.
Robert's point is the best of all though, above the high batting average, RBI's, and low ERA is the grade point average and doing well in school. It's a weapon that doesn't see what CIF Division you play in, especially at the 97th ranked public school in the nation.
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