I agree that a women’s tennis scholarship from Georgetown, by definition, should be a full ride as it’s a headcount sport.
That said, I have seen schools effectively offer partial scholarships in volleyball, which is also a headcount sport . . . the coach may say, for example, that there’s a scholarship available for 3 out of the 4 years . . .same thing as a 75% scholarship in reality. I don’ t know if the same thing happens in tennis though.
And of course there are also walk-ons (non athletic scholarship players) in headcount sports just as there are in equivalency sports.
But if offered a scholarship, it would be a full scholarship. The OP said she needs financial aid and wants to play, so I assume she would not take the chance of being a walk on.
Flinnt12, in my son’s experience there was no formal communications from admissions after the pre read was completed. The notification came from the coach. In his case I am pretty sure that the only “formal” acknowledgement that he passed the pre read came when schools extended him an offer of support for a letter. Realize though that when he was recruited a couple years ago virtually all of the Ivys (excepting Harvard and kinda, sorta Yale) were stating flat out that no real offers would be made until after pre reads were completed. Some schools even recruited pretty heavily against “phony” offers that were made prior to that point. So the pre reads were a “thing” in football as of 2014. Because my son was fortunate to be in a position where he maintained really good academics while exhibiting the questionable judgment of enjoying violent collisions with other large men, it was pretty clear that offers would be coming once pre reads were done.
But take that all with a grain of salt, because I don’t know if things have changed in the last couple years. Also, it seems like most of the sports frequently discussed here operate differently than what I have observed over the years in football, or wrestling for that matter.
Maybe GTown doesn’t fund their women’s tennis program? Georgetown doesn’t have scholarship football, so there is no need to “make up” the 63 men’s scholarships from a normal FCS football team for Title IX purposes.
Sure programs are not required to offer the maximum allowable number of scholarships, and maybe Georgetown tennis falls into this group. And of course, even in fully funded programs there will likely still be walk ons.
If Georgetown doesn’t have football scholarships it does seem like they take an unusual approach . . .are there any other FCS schools outside the Ivies that do this? IIRC the Patriot League schools generally do offer football scholarships now. I assume there’s no such thing as an FBS school with no football scholarships.
Nonetheless, as twoinanddone mentioned, I believe that if Georgetown offers a women’s tennis scholarship, by definition it will be a full ride as it’s a headcount sport. With the caveat I mentioned above about the possibility, at least in volleyball, of full rides for less than 4 years.
**IF **she gets an athletic scholarship, it will be a full scholarship. If Georgetown doesn’t fund its women’s tennis team, she’ll not get a scholarship offer.
I don’t know if the tennis coach could give admissions assistance without offering a scholar ship or how the NCAA would look at a financial need scholarship if the team gave admissions assistance and a spot on the team. There are rules for ‘preferred walk ons’.
Hey OP I know that this has already been said but I just want to stress how much you fitting together with the rest of the team matters. I play D3 tennis at Case Western and I can attest to the fact that while you have other friends outside the team your teammates are usually who you spend most of your time with, obviously and if you don’t get along with them it can make life tougher. When making my decision I had an offer from WUTSL and they tried to make me rush my decision before getting other offers which led to me declining. I know that Brown is a sure thing but it’s unreasonable for them to make you commit before you know all your options and have thought about how each school and team fits you. BTW this is my experience as a male tennis player so I don’t know if your experience will be different as a female tennis player. Good luck!
@bluewater2015, realizing that my knowledge may be out of date a bit now, but the big distinctions between FCS and FBS (outside of the increase in scholarship limits (85 in FBS v 63 in FCS) is that FCS schools are 1) not required to be fully funded and 2) FCS football is not a head count sport. The second point (combined with the likely letter system) is what helps the Ivy be competitive in FCS, since the general level of aid available across the conference works out for most football recruits to be equivalent or better than the scholarship aid available at other FCS schools. For kids recruited by HYP, the aid is often better than scholly dollars at other schools below the FBS level.
As far as what other Division 1 schools don’t fund football, the Pioneer League is the only “true” non scholarship league in FCS football. By “true” I mean no financial or formalized admissions support, essentially a D3 model in a titular D1 conference. That league exists because of the Dayton rule, which effectively forces most schools who want to be D1 in one sport to play D1 in the others. The NEC conference used to limit themselves to 30 or 35 total scholarships (although their equivalency number was always higher since they permitted the stacking of athletic and academic aid), presumably because this allowed them to save thirty odd “true” women’s scholarships for Title IX purposes. The Patriot (excepting Georgetown) limits themselves to no more than 60 football scholarships divided among no more than 85 rostered players. Because the Patriot does not permit “stacking”, their equivalency number is always going to be 60 for the Title IX offset. As far as other teams in other conferences, I believe it is specific to the school, but there are several schools that don’t traditionally fund all allowed scholarships, although I believe most non NEC/Pioneer schools are funding somewhere in the 50s at a minimum for football. As far as FBS, the service academies are the only non scholly schools of which I am aware. Like the Ivy in FCS, the general aid available at the academies is on par with other schools at the FBS level, and the real brass ring is the admission support in any case.
The problem for Georgetown is that they are academically a fit in the Patriot or Ivy, but athletically a fit in the Pioneer. They don’t have the money to go head to head with the Ivys on general financial aid, and they seem unwilling or unable to fund the 120 extra scholarships necessary to field a scholly Patriot team. On the other hand, excepting Davidson Georgetown is swimming in a whole different academic pond than the Pioneer schools. Without the ability to offer the academic support allowed by the Patriot (similar to the Ivy system). Georgetown would get regularly crushed (just like Davidson does) in the Pioneer.
Technically there is nothing that says a scholarship in a head count sport must be a full ride. The rule essentially says that every athlete receiving some sort of scholarship money counts equally toward the scholarship limit whether they’re receiving a 10% scholarship or 100%. So it is usually in teams’ best interest to offer their head count sports scholarships as full rides, but nothing requiring that it must be full ride.
@Ohiodad51 thanks - very interesting and informative and good point about Davidson as well as Georgetown.
Honestly I have wondered why Davidson bothers competing in D1 as it is so clearly a classic D3 type liberal arts college. I assume the answer is they don’t want to give up playing D1 men’s basketball. Still I wonder how many other D1 schools there are with <2000 students.
Yep. Pretty much the problem for the entire Pioneer. But Davidson gets it on both ends. They are very small, and very different academically from the rest of the Pioneer. I really liked the Davidson coaches. They recruit my son’s high school really hard (a former player is a coach down there). Great guys who know they have an uphill battle to try and be competitive, and are looking at a very thin sliver of kids who are just a bit below the Ivy and Patriot level athletically but who can still get in the school with the limited academic help they can give.
Presbyterian is D1 and has 1200 students (and lopsided with female enrollment). I was told by the women’s lacrosse coach that they will always fully fund the women’s teams because they are not willing to give up the football team and they need the women’s teams to offset the men’s teams, that they are not willing to drop to D3 or D2. They had pretty nice athletic facilities.
If anyone is interested in knowing how Georgetown operates regarding women’s tennis and scholarships, they only have a little bit less than ONE full scholarship. The coach divides this scholarship up amongst 3 different girls at about $10,000-$15,000 per player. @Ohiodad51@twoinanddone@bluewater2015@CCDD14@Eagledad33
If anyone cares about what ended up happening, Penn offered me a spot at the very last second before I had to make a decision and I accepted! I can’t believe I will be attending my dream school! However, if they hadn’t offered, I was planning on committing to Brown over my other options. So excited to be a part of Penn’s CAS class of 2021!