Of his 10-week summer offseason, Georgia Tech men’s golf coach Bruce Heppler plans to spend nine of them on golf courses around the country translating what he sees into numbers on his Excel spreadsheet.
Heppler is tracking the country’s best junior golfers. In the coldest light, he is calculating their worth and determining if they can fit in his scholarship allotment. It’s a summer ritual for coaches in most NCAA sports, hitting the road to scout prospects and assess how much of a scholarship he or she deserves.
Unlike coaches in football, basketball and a few other Division I sports where full scholarships are the standard, college coaches in most sports make a practice of offering partial grants. As a result, the practice of bidding for players, searching for bargains and saving scholarship room from year to year is the norm. They compare the process to the work of NFL and NBA salary-cap managers.
“Obviously, you’ve got to be careful you don’t overpay just to get a guy,” Heppler said. “You certainly don’t want to go out and shop at the Mercedes lot and get a Ford Focus.”
Quite the opposite, coaches often look for No. 1 singles players or all-conference goalkeepers willing to take scholarship money more appropriate for lesser athletes.
“At the end of the day, your major hope is that everybody getting aid is producing,” Georgia State men’s tennis coach Chase Hodges said.
According to NCAA rules for Division I schools, FBS (formerly Division I-A) football, men’s and women’s basketball and women’s gymnastics, tennis and volleyball are “head-count sports,” meaning they can grant scholarships to a limited number of student-athletes. In football’s case, for instance, it’s 85. A coach in those sports could offer a prospect a half-scholarship, but it wouldn’t serve a purpose since he or she couldn’t use the other half on another athlete.
The remaining sports are called “equivalency sports,” which limit the amount of scholarships that schools can award. Baseball, FCS (formerly Division I-AA) football and men’s and women’s ice hockey are equivalency sports, but also cap the number of team members on scholarship. For instance, a baseball coach can divide his 11.7 scholarships among up to 27 players.
For the rest, schools can divide scholarships among as many athletes as they desire. Georgia women’s soccer coach Steve Holeman will offer grants to cover just books, which could be less than 5 percent of a full ride, to spread out his 14 scholarships among as many as 25 players.
A variety of factors determine how much of a scholarship a coach will offer a prospect, starting with his or her ability. A team’s level or position of need, available scholarship room, offers from competing schools and the pool of prospects will influence the offer.
A top athlete in a weak class will field better offers than in a stronger year. If a team is graduating several seniors and the coach needs to re-stock the roster, he might make more aggressive offers than he might otherwise. On the other hand, Heppler said, there have been instances where he and prospects had mutual interest, but all of his 4.5 scholarships were accounted for, so the prospects went elsewhere.
Often, he said, “You’ve got the money and you don’t have the player or you have the player and you don’t have the money.”
Holeman said that a player to whom Georgia might offer a half scholarship, a mid-major conference school valuing that player more could counter with a full scholarship. Families of recruits will negotiate with multiple schools in hopes of landing the best deal.
“That’s one of the downsides of the equivalency sports,” Holeman said. “Occasionally, you just get into a bidding war.”
In their recruiting, coaches at Georgia colleges have a considerable edge with the HOPE scholarship program. They often ask prospects who have qualified to accept the HOPE grant, which covered 90 percent of tuition in the past academic year, and augment it with athletic-scholarship money. For HOPE-qualifying athletes, a coach can match any offer from an out-of-state or private college for a fraction of what the competitor can, keeping scholarship room clear for more prospects. (Keeping that athlete at a 3.0 GPA to maintain the HOPE is another matter.)
“That’s a huge advantage,” said Hodges, the Georgia State tennis coach. “That’s why we’re increasingly recruiting the best kids in the state.”
There is a considerable minefield in having team members on varying amounts of aid. A men’s tennis player or golfer on a full ride plays with the pressure of providing a return on having more than 20 percent of the scholarship budget invested in him. An athlete on a large scholarship who doesn’t produce hurts his or her team not only with weak results, but also in preventing the coach from using that room on a better performer, an outcome Heppler said can “cripple teams.”
Former Tech track and field star Alphonso Jordan said that he felt pressure trying to qualify for the NCAA championships, which raised his scholarship from 80 percent to full. He had turned down full-ride offers from North Carolina and N.C. State to compete and study architecture at Tech. But he could understand the weight of expectations falling on full-scholarship athletes.
“I think [some athletes] would say you have to produce now that you’re on a full ride because now eyes are all on you,” he said.
NCAA rules allow for a coach to reduce aid, but the student-athlete has the opportunity to appeal. In the past, Heppler has asked families of prospects to consider accepting smaller grants than they might have otherwise merited so he could recruit better teammates. Many have accepted.
“You probably want to ask one of your top players to give back,” said Holeman, who has never used that maneuver. As an athlete, “you don’t want to give money to a player that’s going to take your spot.”
An athlete who outperforms his aid may ask for more, a reward that coaches usually extend, but sometimes may not be possible. Not surprisingly, coaches try to keep who’s getting what between them and each team member.
As Hodges and his colleagues evaluate potential additions to their rosters this summer in courses, gyms and fields nationwide, they have plenty to consider.
Said Hodges, “It’s not an exact science, but you do the best you can to make it work.”
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