TCU ‘pleasantly surprised’ by NCAA granting extra eligibility to spring athletes
The NCAA is granting every spring sport athlete an extra year of eligibility. Winter sport athletes will not be granted extra eligibility.
The NCAA announced its decision on Monday as the spring sport seasons came to a halt earlier this month amid the coronavirus pandemic. It came on the heels of whether the NCAA would change course given the financial shortfall being felt by universities during this crisis.
“I’m definitely pleasantly surprised considering how the momentum seemed to be turning in the opposite direction of late,” TCU athletic director Jeremiah Donati said. “It’s exciting to think these young men and women will have the opportunity to continue to live out their dreams on campus and finish what they started.”
At least three other Big 12 athletic directors were equally as surprised as Donati — in a positive manner.
However, seeing no eligibility relief for winter sport athletes was difficult to swallow, particularly for TCU’s women’s basketball program. The Horned Frogs had six seniors and were in position to make the NCAA Tournament for the first time in a decade.
Most expressed an interest in returning, if given the opportunity after having the Big 12 tournament and March Madness called off earlier this month.
“Another heartbreak for our team,” TCU women’s basketball coach Raegan Pebley said. “I am so happy for the spring sports. It was the right thing to do. My heart just breaks for our players, in particular our seniors.
“This team worked for nearly 345 days for the most important 20-plus days of the season. Those 20-plus days are ones that they will never get. I wanted that for them and they wanted it.”
As Pebley said, at least it’s good news for the spring athletes.
The NCAA is relaxing its rules from its traditional policy of playing four seasons in five years.
Programs that have returning seniors will be allowed to carry more members on scholarship to account for incoming recruits. In other words, if a school returns three senior baseball players who each had 1/3-scholarship, the baseball team would be allowed to have 12.7 scholarships instead of 11.7 during the 2020-21 school year.
However, schools have the flexibility to grant returning seniors anywhere from a 0% scholarship to matching the aid a player received last year.
“In a nod to the financial uncertainty faced by higher education, the Council vote also provided schools with the flexibility to give students the opportunity to return for 2020-21 without requiring that athletics aid be provided at the same level awarded for 2019-20,” the NCAA said. “This flexibility applies only to student-athletes who would have exhausted eligibility in 2019-20.”
The NCAA also increased the roster limit for baseball teams to account for players returning, which is the only spring sport with such a limit.
With that being said, schools and programs will have roster management issues to navigate in the coming months.
It’s also unclear whether returning seniors will be able to transfer schools. The general belief is that seniors will have that luxury, but their next school would not be granted the financial exception.
But those are minor details to be worked out. Most are simply happy to see the NCAA follow through after the D-I Council announced earlier this month that “eligibility relief is appropriate for all Division I student-athletes who participated in spring sports.”
That seemed like a common sense approach a day after the NCAA canceled March Madness and the spring sport championships.
But it was not a given in recent days. The extra eligibility declaration came before the NCAA announced that it would be distributing only $225 million, instead of $600 million, to Division I members and conferences following the cancellation of March Madness.
The financial impact felt by universities amid the pandemic is why some felt the extra eligibility relief could “turn sideways,” as one source put it.
In the end, though, the NCAA is doing what most feel is right after spring sport athletes had their seasons cut short.
Several college athletes, including TCU baseball players, took to social media over the weekend to plead their case. The message was received.
“The Council’s decision gives individual schools the flexibility to make decisions at a campus level,” Council chair M. Grace Calhoun, athletics director at Penn, said in a news release. “The Board of Governors encouraged conferences and schools to take action in the best interest of student-athletes and their communities, and now schools have the opportunity to do that.”
This story was originally published March 30, 2020 at 6:42 PM.
