By Staff
Athletic Management, 18.3, April/May 2006, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/am/am1803/wubaseballidea.htm
Baseball coaches are sick of the way they are forced to offer scholarships, and they’re not going to take it anymore. That was the sentiment this winter among members of the American Baseball Coaches Association (ABCA), which is attempting to come up with some new ideas on how to structure scholarships in NCAA Division I.
Like many other Division I sports, baseball gives out equivalency scholarships. Baseball coaches have the equivalent of 11.7 full grants-in-aid to offer athletes, and most spread the money out based on each athlete’s worth to the team. While one player may have a full ride, another may be offered only a small stipend. And this is where the problem lies.
Mike Gaski, Head Baseball Coach at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, says a typical recruiting trip includes a difficult conversation: discussing with a player exactly what percentage of a scholarship his athletic ability is worth. “Nobody who goes out to recruit is happy with this system,” says Gaski, who is also a member of the NCAA Division I Baseball Rules Committee. “It’s humiliating to tell a family, ‘We think your son is worth 20 percent.’ You do that with used cars. Baseball coaches have become rug salesmen in terms of how we have to recruit now.”
The small partial scholarships also help fuel baseball’s high transfer rate, another trend troubling coaches. “It’s easy for a player who’s getting nothing more than one semester of room and board to look at other schools if everything isn’t completely to his liking,” says Dave Keilitz, Executive Director of the ABCA. “Baseball leads the country in transfers, and the lack of scholarship dollars is the major reason.”
The NCAA’s new classroom measure for teams, the Academic Progress Rate (APR), has put the transfer issue foremost in coaches’ minds as well. When a player transfers out, his team loses a point toward its APR. When enough points are lost, a team faces sanctions.
One of the ABCA’s proposed solutions is to do away with equivalency scholarships, and instead allow each institution to offer 27 tuition-and-fees-only scholarships. In this way, each athlete receives the same offer, whether he is a player-of-the-year candidate or buried on the bench. In addition, the offers among schools would be equal, reducing the lure of transferring to a school that extends a bigger chunk of money.
“Limiting scholarships to an institution’s cost for tuition and fees is a completely new idea that has never been considered in any other sport,” says Keilitz. “It would mean that no baseball player could get a full scholarship [with room and board], but the reality is that very few baseball players get full scholarships now.”
One drawback to the plan, however, is that it would cause disparities among schools with different tuition costs. “The idea would work fine if every institution’s tuition was in the same general price range, but there is a huge discrepancy between tuition at private and public institutions,” says Robert Steitz, Senior Associate Athletic Director at Villanova University and another Baseball Rules Committee member. “For example, at Villanova, our tuition is $27,000 a year. Multiply that by 27 scholarships, and you get a very, very large number. It would be extremely difficult for us to keep up.”
However, private institutions could possibly use their higher tuition as a recruiting tool, Gaski points out. “Suddenly Notre Dame can say to a kid, ‘We’re giving you the full value of a Notre Dame education, which is worth a lot of money,’” he says.
A second, less radical idea the ABCA is looking at is simply to increase the maximum number of equivalencies allowed in the sport. A proposal coaches are currently debating is to up the current 11.7 equivalencies allotment to 14.
Keilitz acknowledges that any plan to raise scholarship limits will face hurdles. About half of the 285 baseball programs in Division I currently offer less than the full allotment of 11.7 equivalencies, and increasing the amount of allowable aid may put them at a greater disadvantage.
Even so, a recent ABCA poll shows 70 percent of Division I baseball coaches are in favor of adding scholarships. “As an association, we feel strongly about this,” says Keilitz. “It’s time to address it.”
Over the next few months, a special committee organized by the ABCA will discuss and refine the ideas for change, with the aim of sending a proposal to the NCAA by July. In the meantime, administrators of all equivalency sports will be watching the issue closely.
“This idea provides an interesting new concept,” Steitz says. “Everyone is interested in ways to grow sports and provide more opportunities. It could apply to other sports, but like any other new idea, it needs some work.”