I posted this on the financial aid forum but thought this may be a better spot
My daughter is a high school junior. She is being recruited for an athletic scholarship (acro/tumbling). She had a coach tell her today that she would not qualify by the NCAA rules to combine an academic and merit scholarship. This seems like information contrary to what I am finding online. She has a 25 ACT (1190 SAT) 3.86 GPA, and in the top 14% of her graduating class. Does anyone have any info they can share on this? We arenât so concerned about this school but she is extremely concerned about another division 1 school and if this info is true not being able to combine money there. The school she is really interested in has a net cost calculator which stated she would be eligible for a scholarship for merit from the school itself for $13,000/year. Would this combine with an athletic scholarship? Help please!!!
I can only give you our experience, my daughter is swimming for D1 school next year with both merit and athletic aid. Your daughter would certainly meet NCAA eligibility criteria based on GPA and ACT, but each school has different levels of funding for each sport, but that is specific to each school not NCAA. There is a limit to total amount of aid a school can offer and you can not receive more than total costs and some conferences allow additional small living stipend.
@twoinanddone whatâs the D1 ACT/SAT and GPA (weighted or unweighted) requirement to get merit scholarship in addition to athletic scholarship? Thanks!
@ Twoinanddone - can you point me to the NCAA/D1 ACT/SAT requirement where a 25 on the ACT is insufficient? That doesnât sound right.
@ michhoff - She should be eligible for any merit scholarships as long as the scholarship is determined on an objective basis, and does not have a subjective-decision-element to it. (See bylaw 15.02.4.3-4). For example, if she has to write an application for the scholarship, which is then evaluated and awarded to a select group of students, that may not be allowed because it could be used as a back-door athletic scholarship. If the scholarship is available to anyone with a 25 ACT/3.5 GPA, then it should be ok. As noted above, though, itâs possible that the specific school will count any merit scholarship against his overall budget, meaning that he would reduce her athletic scholarship on a dollar-for-dollar basis.
If it matters, the merit scholarship (if renewable), is a better option because it canât be revoked if she decides not to stay on the athletic team.
Is it possible that the rules may be different from school to school as well? Our daughter received athletic and merit offers from a private D1 school but was told she could not combine them because this was school policy. She was, however, able to combine at other D1 schools. I wish I fully understood all this!
Our experience has been that different schools allow stacking of aide differently. A certain amount of âschoolâ aide - be that athletic and merit and even other school related scholarships in our case can only stack to a certain amount. Then external (not from the school) scholarships can be added. Honestly, it is all very confusing for sure, but I think each school is different and your FAFSA plays in. From what Iâve been told, you are better to take the merit aid so that if the athletic goes away for any reason you donât loose that scholarship money.
Thatâs a summary of Bylaw 15.02.4.3. An ACT of 25 wouldnât add to a sum score of 105, and the OPâs SAT is slightly below the required 1200. The NCAA only requires the student to meet one of the three requirements to accept the merit and athletic aid. I think the coach the OP was talking to may have been referring to a school requirement and not the NCAAâs requirement but is used to blaming any restriction on the NCAA.
The schools can limit the merit/athletic scholarships in any way they want. My Dâs allows combining merit and athletic, but requires all aid issued by the school be used on billed costs only, and wonât give the students money to spend on rent or food off campus. NCAA allows it, but the school doesnât. There are a couple of old threads on an athletic forum Iâm on that tell tales of the schools telling the kids that they have to choose athletic or merit, but canât have both. Thatâs a schoolâs position, not NCAA.
My understanding of the top 10%/ACT total 105/3.5 GPA issue is that this is the minimum requirement for automatic academic scholarships not to count towards the sportâs equivalency limit. Different sports may have different rules (baseball, for instance, is more restrictive), but in the absence of a specific rule, this is what determines how academic scholarships count towards the teamâs scholarship cap. The rule is actually in Section 15.5.3.2.2.1 of the NCAA bylaws. I would run through the bylaws (well, ârun throughâ is a misnomerâtheyâre 470 pages long!) and see if there are any special rules for acro/tumbling.
As others have noted, however, what the school can do as to stacking academic and merit scholarships and what it will do are not always the same. Also, if the sport is not fully-funded, whether academic money counts against the schoolâs equivalency limit may not matter. I wouldnât hesitate to ask the coach at the other D1 school if your daughter is interested and vice-versa. I have not talked with any of the coaches my daughter is in contact with, but as hands-off as I am generally, it is my money on the line here, and I expect to be involved in those discussions.
We tried to have my daughter be the communicator with the coach. Didnât work. One day Daughter asked, "canât you just do the money part?â and that worked a lot better than the game of âtelephoneâ that we were playing with the coach telling my daughter something, D relaying to me, me asking a question and it going back to the coach. Also the coach was new to the school so didnât understand how the merit awards worked. Once we came to an agreement, I still had to spend hours on the phone with the FA office to get everything applied correctly.
@twoinanddone , I thought of this last night. My daughter received an email offering her a full ride swim scholarship, and she did not even understand what they were talking about. She handed her phone to me and asked what it meant. Ummm, $60K/year is what it means, Sweetie. So, yeah, in case I had any doubt, Iâll be involved when they talk $$.
My Div. 1 D had to choose between a need-based scholarship or athletic money. She chose the former. As a result, she had to turn down a local high school scholarship based on athletics, because it she had accepted the money the award would cause her financial aid to now be considered an athletic scholarship, and the schoolâs total allotment of scholarship money was already distributed to other students. So that would have taken them out of NCAA compliance. In other words, D was told she couldnât stack. I think it depends on whether the school is fully-funded for the sport or not.
My Div. 3 D keeps hearing about friends and teammates getting athletic money at Div. 3 schools, which supposedly Div. 3 schools canât do. People who I believe are not liars insist this is the case. Supposedly the schools pretend itâs academic merit. This confuses me. My D is a pretty strong recruit for that levelâa better athlete AND far better student than the kids in questionâand was not offered money anywhere. However, D was looking at much higher ranked schools.
The NCAA does a pretty good job of policing Div 3 money. They even track whether an athlete or team is getting preferential treatment for work study money/jobs, housing, things from benefactors.
Once an athlete takes any need based money, ALL money received through the school counts. If a team isnât fully funded, an outside athlete scholarship might be allowed as the team would have âroomâ to count that outside scholarship and really not cost the team anything, but if the student took need based money, everything would count against the team.
^ That is how I understand it to be, but I canât tell you how many parents have insisted that the college sweetened the pot for their student athlete because they want him or her for a team.
Many parents are (to be generous) not 100% cognizant of the difference between need and merit and (somewhat less charitably) can be tempted to characterize one as the other, as there is definitely a cache to one that is lacking in the other in certain circles.
Many parents have told me that their D got a âfull rideâ because they either donât know or count on others not knowing how rare such things are in equivalency sports. To name check a thread on another part of CC, that is when you just âsmile and nodâ.
âRareâ doesnât mean ânonexistent,â as my swimmer has been offered one based entirely on her times. We do not qualify for need-based, and at this school, especially, she isnât even close to qualifying for merit. I agree, however, that I have definitely heard of more âfull ridesâ that could not possibly be so than could be. Regardless, NCAA rules on counting merit aid and need-based aid are not the same. If weâre talking about need-based, the rules above about how merit aid counts towards equivalencies, i.e., the 105 total ACT, 3.5 GPA, etc., is irrelevant.
I can only worry about what my daughter receives, not what all the other kids claiming to have a full ride get. There is one on our team whose father has said, a number of times, that his D is getting a âfull ride.â I know sheâs not because I know what her athletic scholarship is and I know the COA. Those two numbers are not the same.
planit, if the coach is willing to give a full scholarship to one freshman, he must really want your child. Fourteen scholarships just donât go that far when divided among a full team and are usually sliced a lot thinner.
@twoinanddone , I appreciate that it is unusual, but she actually received another offer of a full athletic ride tonight. She is NOT an Olympic-level swimmer by any means. I think that she has just done a good job of targeting schools where she can score at conference with her current times, and sheâs made her interest known early. Still, I am as flabbergasted as anyone to have such generous offers on the table. We did not go into this even hoping for more than 50%.
There are a lot of things meant by âfull rideâ, depending on who is talking. I think many parents mean âI am not paying COA/tuition out of pocketâ, which is very different from âMy childâs COA is fully funded without loansâ or even âMy childâs COA is fully funded from athleticsâ. I have heard all of the above called âfull ridesâ.
