Anytime the football team takes the field, some 115 uniformed players roam the sidelines of Carter-Finley Stadium. Eighty-five of them are on scholarship.
In contrast, whenever the baseball team hits the diamond at Doak Field, some 35 guys sit in the dugout with only 11.7 scholarships to split among the players.
“It’s hard — plain and simple,” baseball coach Elliott Avent said. “It’s an enormous challenge to divide 11.7 scholarships. Baseball needs more scholarship money.”
But the issue of scholarships isn’t as simple as pumping more scholarship money into athletics. NCAA regulations govern not only the amount of scholarship money that can be distributed, but also the types of scholarships.
Two types of athletic scholarships are available: equivalency scholarships and head-count scholarships. The NCAA designates which type of scholarship each sport can use.
Head-count scholarships mean a coach can have a certain number of athletes on his or her roster on scholarship. Football, men’s and women’s basketball, gymnastics, volleyball and women’s tennis use head-count scholarships.
If a sport uses equivalency scholarships, then its players receive partial scholarships off a cumulative total available to the entire team. All other sports use equivalency scholarships.
Unequal and unfair?
With 74 percent of the football team’s players on scholarship and slightly more than 33 percent of the baseball team’s players on scholarship, a disparity exists in terms of the resources available to different sports.
But Jon Fagg, the associate athletics director for compliance, said it’s not necessarily a matter of fairness.
“I don’t know if you can describe it as fair or not fair,” he said. “It’s just the way it is. Over many years, it has become that way. You can argue why shouldn’t football have the flexibility to split up their scholarships.”
Fagg said preferences for certain types of scholarships vary among coaches.
“In women’s tennis, they have eight scholarships, but they could get 15 or 16 kids if they could split the scholarships,” Fagg said. “But they can’t split them, so they get eight scholarship players. I’m sure there are some coaches who wish they could spread them out, and I’m sure there are some coaches who wish they had head-count scholarships.”
Women’s tennis coach Hans Olsen, whose sport uses head-count scholarships, said he’d like the freedom to split scholarships as necessary, which is available to sports using equivalency scholarships.
“The idea of having eight full scholarships is good,” Olsen said. “But the downside is I can’t split them up. It’s either yes or no. There’s no option to split the eight scholarships up among 15 players. Sometimes it would be nice to incrementally bump someone’s scholarship up as they progress through their career, and that’s unavailable to head-count sports.”
However, Olsen said he believes the current scholarship limits are fair.
“There is some fairness to it. Every sport is different,” he said. “You have to have an intimate knowledge of the sport to really understand it. You have to look at the frequency of injuries, the number of available recruits, the standard of first-string, second-string, third-string — it’s different from sport to sport.”
One possible solution, according to Olsen, is to allow for a few of the scholarships in head-count sports to be split up like equivalency scholarships. Such a situation would allow coaches more flexibility in dealing with difficult circumstances.
“We have six girls that play,” Olsen said. “If you have eight scholarships, we’re only a couple of injuries away from having a situation where walk-ons play. You’ve got to have good players who aren’t on scholarship to have a good team. A better situation for women’s tennis would be having six head-count scholarships and two equivalencies. It would give us a lot more options to work with.”
Scholarship Limits
According to a report from the NCAA Academic Eligibility Compliance Financial Aid Subcommittee obtained via e-mail, the limits for scholarships are based on a number of factors inherent to each sport.
“It appears the rationale for the grant-in-aid limits were based on the size of the prospective student-athlete pool, the inherent risk of injury in the sport, the competitive squad size and/or the particular team scoring method,” the report said.
The report also cited Title IX concerns as a reason for why women’s sports have more money available for scholarships than men’s sports in some instances.
“Serious and careful thought was given to the financial impact of the recommended figures on member institutions’ ability to meet Title IX proportionality requirements,” the report said. “It is for this reason that some of the women’s financial aid limits in comparable sports are slightly higher than for men.”
NCAA officials, however, did not respond to several requests for information on related issues, including regarding Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship. If a similar opportunity were available to North Carolina athletes, perceived inequities in the number of scholarships available would be reduced.
According to the Georgia Student Finance Commission, high school students in Georgia who earn 3.2 GPAs on a 4.0 scale are eligible for the HOPE Scholarship.
“At public colleges, the HOPE Scholarship provides full tuition, approved mandatory fees (such as health and student activity fees) and a $300 per academic year book allowance. Room and board expenses are not covered,” according to the GSFC Web site.
Avent said the state of Georgia is “loaded with good baseball players, and it’s pretty much just the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech competing for those players.”
“If they can get eight guys on the HOPE Scholarship from in-state, they can take 11.7 and really offer a great deal of money to out-of-state guys,” Avent said.
Fagg said the NCAA only considers in its scholarship limits financial aid given by the individual institutions.
“The school doesn’t control the HOPE Scholarship,” Fagg said. “It’s controlled by the state government. Those things, the school doesn’t have any say. If I go to the University of Georgia, and I have whatever credentials the HOPE Scholarship requires, I automatically get the money.”
So, players in Georgia who earn the HOPE Scholarship do not count against Georgia Tech’s 11.7 available scholarships for baseball.
Fagg said the NCAA has considered several proposals regarding the inequity, but nothing has passed.
“There have been several proposals to deal with that stuff, but none of them seemed to deal with enough of the issue to be passed,” he said.
Avent said the in-state/out-of-state distinction is important in equivalency-scholarship sports because a 30-percent scholarship for a player from North Carolina does not cover the same amount of money as a 30-percent scholarship for a player who will need to pay out-of-state tuition.
“If I gave an in-state player 30 percent and an out-of-state player 30 percent, it counts the same against my equivalency,” Avent said. “The difference is the in-state guy is paying 70 percent of $12,000, and the out-of-state guy is paying 70 percent of $24,000. It puts a greater burden on the families.”
Junior baseball player Joe Florio, a New Jersey native, said NCAA rules made it hard for players and their families paying out-of-state tuition.
“It poses challenges to the families that can’t really afford the tuition,” Florio said. “Up until last year, the NCAA didn’t allow college athletes to have jobs that made more than $2,000 per year. When we get home from the field, even if you have a half of a scholarship, you’re still paying for half it. A lot of us like to go work an hour or two — do something on the side to make some money and help make tuition.”
