Basketball recruiting

COLLEGE RECRUITING
HOW ATHLETIC SCHOLARSHIPS WORK
By David Galehouse
Director - www.varsityedge.com
Student-athlete resource center for players, parents, and coaches.
Author- The Making of a Student-Athlete

Scholarships are a confusing topic and families have been conditioned to believe that there are plenty of
athletic scholarships available at any and every school. Athletic scholarships are only offered at the D1 & D2
NCAA level and at NAIA and Junior Colleges. There are no athletic scholarships at the Ivy League and D3
level as these programs are only allowed to offer financial aid. Many families automatically dismiss D3
athletics for this reason, but it's often possible to get a more attractive financial aid package from a D3 school
than an athletic package from a D1 & D2 school. In reality, only 49% of all NCAA D1 and D2 athletes receive
"some" athletic scholarship money and some could only be a few hundred dollars a year.

The Good News

There are roughly 327 NCAA Division One teams that
offer men’s basketball and all D1 teams offer the
maximum of 13 athletic scholarships for men.

There are roughly 324 NCAA Division One teams that
offer women’s basketball and all D1 teams offer 15
athletic scholarships for women.

There are roughly 278 D2 men’s basketball teams
and 276 D2 women’s basketball teams. These
teams are allowed to offer 10 scholarships per team,
but unlike scholarships at the D1 level, it is up to the
school to decide how many to actually offer, and how
many they offer will be largely based on the success
of the school, the program, and how much money the
school allocates to basketball and other sports.

There are 390 D3 men’s basketball teams and 422
D3 women’s basketball teams. D3 college do not
offer athletic scholarships for any sport.
These numbers will vary slightly as colleges add and
remove athletic programs at their discretion.

The Bad News
Let’s say a D1 men’s team has 13 players on it - that’
s 4,251 players (13 players x 326 teams). D1
basketball has a rule called the 5/8 rule. Without
going into great detail, it basically says that basketball
coaches cannot recruit more than 5 players in one
year and no more than 8 players in two years. The
rule was established to make sure that coaches were
not recruiting many talented players, then having
tryouts and choosing the very best players and getting
rid of the other players. The rule has also been
relaxed to account for some transfer students as well
as players that leave a program early for the NBA.

Most college basketball teams have between 3 or 4
scholarships available each year to give to potential
recruits. We will look at these numbers in two ways,
one by using 3 scholarships a year and the other by
using 4 scholarships per year.

If there are 327 teams that give out an average of 3
basketball scholarships a year, that works out to 981
D1 men’s basketball scholarships each year.

With 4 scholarships a year, the available scholarship
figure goes to 1,308 D1 men’s basketball
scholarships each year. Now this might sound like a
lot, but lets look at it this way. Since coaches compete
for athletes throughout the entire country, if you divide
981 scholarships by 50 states, you get 19.62 D1 men’
s basketball scholarships per state. Imagine if
someone in the state of California put every high
school basketball senior in a room and said "only 19
of you sitting here will get a Division 1 basketball
scholarship!" You would probably get a lot of laughs
from the crowd, but
it’s true. You also need to factor in the number of
players coming from foreign countries. Basketball is a
global sport and many foreign players are coming to
U.S. Colleges to compete, thus reducing the number
of scholarships awarded to U.S. players even more.

Now, some people will tell you that since there are
hundreds of thousands of high school basketball
players playing basketball, your chances of receiving
an athletic scholarship are very slim. In reality, this
statement makes NO sense for a number of reasons.
(1) Not every high school basketball player has the
desire to play at the college level. (2) Not every high
school basketball player has the skills to play Division
One basketball. So, in reality, you are competing with
a much smaller pool of players that have both the
desire and skills to play basketball at the college level
and be awarded a basketball scholarship.

Lets look at scholarships in more detail.

Full Scholarships
Full scholarships are just what they sound like. Your
tuition, room and board, meals, and books are paid
for. Full scholarships are actually very rare. While
there are plenty of full scholarships for D1 football
and basketball players, very few other sports at the
D1 & D2 level offer full scholarships to individual
athletes. Its easy for football and basketball and
sometimes hockey, because they often bring in
hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars for
the school through attendance and TV contracts, but
how many people pay to go see a college golf match
or rowing match?

After the first full scholarship offer has been extended
to you, you may find that you get many other
scholarship offers from other schools that suddenly
think you are a legitimate player, some even from
schools that haven’t seen you play. If one school
thinks you are that good, it’s safe for the other
schools to assume you can play for them as well.
This happens a lot in football and basketball as many
teams compete for the same players and one coach’
s faith in a player can signal other coaches.

Partial Scholarships
A coach takes the available scholarship money and
divides it up among several players. The coach may
choose to offer $20,000 to one S-A or $1,000 to 20 S-
A's. This is the most common use of scholarship
money as only a few teams and sports have enough
money to reward everyone on the team a full athletic
scholarship. Since available scholarships are
converted into available dollar amounts, a coach will
usually offer you a dollar amount per year and not a
percentage like 25%. Some families get caught up in

trying to figure out if their scholarship covers,
classes, room and board, or books. Simply look at a
scholarship as a sum of money towards your entire
tuition bill. If you have the skills to play D1 basketball,
you don’t have to worry about partial scholarships
because they are not offered, but partial scholarships
can and will be offered at the D3 level.

Renewal of Scholarships
Scholarships are not guaranteed for four years but
renewed each year. Some schools will verbally
guarantee them for all 4+ years you are at the school.
If coaches at bigger schools with well-known
reputations started revoking scholarships of players
because they didn’t play well after a year, those
coaches would never be able to sign another recruit.
A D1 or D2 institution must inform you by July 1 in
writing whether your grant for the upcoming year has
been renewed. If your scholarship is not renewed,
you can request a hearing with school officials
outside of the athletic department. We haven't come
across any cases of scholarships not being renewed
because of poor athletic performance, and a school
doing this to even one recruit would probably cause
more harm to their recruiting efforts. It can happen
when new coaches are hired though!

Reduction or Cancellation of Scholarship
Under the following conditions, your scholarship can
be removed:
1 - You become ineligible for intercollegiate
competition.
2 - You fraudulently misrepresent info on an
application, Letter of Intent or financial aid agreement.
3 - Engage in conduct warranting substantial
disciplinary penalty.
4 - Voluntarily withdraw from your sport on your own.
Remember - when you accept a scholarship, you
cannot quit the team and expect a free education. If
you cannot afford school, it may be your only chance
to get a college education, but fulfilling your
obligations to a coach and program may actually
cause your education to suffer. The irony is worth
mentioning.

Don’t assume a school has scholarships available
or no scholarships available. It’s important to ask
each individual coach what is available at that
particular institution. If the coach thinks you are
interested in coming to the school and you don’t even
ask for scholarship money, they might not offer it.

Other Options
Grants, non-athletic scholarships - and financial aid.
It's probable that you will find more financial aid
money at a particular school than athletic
scholarship money. NCAA D3 doesn’t offer athletic
scholarships, but you might be surprised how
generous some schools are able to make your
financial aid package. This is especially true for
schools with institutional aid, (aid that is dispersed
after federal monies are awarded). The criteria for
institutional aid is strictly up to the school! For
example: Some wealthy alumni might have endowed
the school a scholarship for a S-A who overcame
extreme hardship to excel and move on to college.
The winner of that has a full ride, but it’s not an
athletic scholarship. One football coach who used to
work at a D3 school in Ohio told us that it was routine
for teams in their conference to take the aid offer that
a rival school gave to a top recruit, and say to the
folks in financial aid, "come on, we need to win here,
what can you do for us" and a lot of times they were
able to match the rivals package. This isn't supposed
to go on, and it doesn’t at all schools, but it happens.

NAIA Scholarships
On April 1, 2003, Concordia College (CA) def.
Mountain State (W.Va.) 88-84 to win the NAIA D1 men’
s basketball championship. How many of you knew
that? Probably less than the number of people who
know that Syracuse won the NCAA basketball
championship the same year. What is the point? The
point is that the NAIA has plenty of good programs,
talented athletes, excellent coaches, and they do
have championships!

The majority of NAIA schools are in the south, mid-
west and far west part of the U.S., but there are a few
in most states. There are roughly 330 NAIA schools.
In general, NAIA schools are small, private
institutions, and athletics are competitive, but are not
afforded a large budget like many NCAA schools. At
the NAIA D1 level, there are 11 basketball
scholarships offered. At the NAIA D2 level, there are 6
basketball scholarships offered. Again, this is
assuming that a particular school in fact offers that
many.

Division III Athletics
While D3 colleges cannot offer athletic scholarships
(they are not allowed) many D3 programs offer far
superior academic programs to D1 or D2 colleges
and offer far more financial aid than you might find at
a D1 or D2 college. As we stated earlier, many
families and players dismiss D3 programs because
they are so focused on getting an athletic
scholarship, rather than focused on finding the
college that provides them the best fit for their skills
and desires. Since there are not that many
scholarship opportunities in basketball and it takes a
high degree of skill to play at the D1 level, many of
you would be best served by finding other programs
where your skills would be a better fit and will offer
you a chance to play college basketball. There are
many amazing programs out there and you need to
work hard at finding a program that is a good match
for your skills and desires.

Your Goals

Your goal in the recruiting process and the college search should be to use your athletic talent to gain admission to the best academic
school you can get into, to play at the highest level you can successfully compete at, at a school that you enjoy socially.

This is three goals in one - a high level of academics, high level of athletics, and a good social atmosphere. You can factor a schools
location only if you think it’s going to be a problem, meaning that you cannot afford plane tickets back and forth or if you think your family will
want to watch you play on a regular basis.

While athletics is important, it’s really only 1/3 of your college experience and while finances are important, the majority of student-athletes
at best might receive a partial athletic scholarship that may be worth a few thousand dollars and most will receive no athletic scholarship at
all. According to the NCAA only about 49% of division 1 and division 2 athletes receive some athletic scholarship money. The rest play for
the love of the game.