The NCAA decided on Monday to extend eligibility to spring-sport seniors and those whose seasons were affected by COVID-19. This applies to all seniors that missed their final seasons ever because of the cancellations.
The NCAA’s decision will also extend the eligibility of all spring-sport student-athletes and will allow schools to expand their rosters beyond current scholarship limits.
“The Council’s decision gives individual schools the flexibility to make decisions at a campus level,” said Division I Council chair M. Grace Calhoun, athletics director at the University of Pennsylvania. “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.”
The Council increased the roster limit in college baseball as well to account for the returning players. Baseball is the only spring college sport that has a limit.
NCAA president Mark Emmert expressed concerns about schools being able to incur the additional scholarship costs in the current economic environment last week.
“The next 12 months are going to be extremely hard on a lot of colleges and universities, especially small colleges that aren’t going to have tuition revenue,” Emmert said. “They’re going to have high costs because they sent their students away, but they still have all of their costs.
“They’re not going to have any revenue from their endowments because of the crash of the stock market. The revenue from the tournaments isn’t going to be there, and the revenue from us is unlikely to be as big as it has been in the past.
“So then to turn around and say, ‘By the way, we’re going to increase the cost of your student athletics program,’ that’s a challenge. For the big schools that are the high-revenue institutions, that’s a whole different deal.
“You have to remember that college sports is, of course, something 1,100 different schools do, and the business models for all of them are very different.”
Spring Only
These rules apply only to spring sports, so men’s and women’s basketball and other winter sports do not have the option to bring back seniors. Seniors across the country have expressed their frustration with the fact they have to miss their chance to play in the NCAA Tournament.
Eric Monroe, a guard at Yale, said, “It’s just sad. I’m definitely a nostalgic person. My childhood was obsessed with the NCAA Tournament, filling out brackets and watching all the games. It was my favorite time of year. I felt so close to living out that dream by playing in a March Madness game.
“At the end of the day, though, basketball is just a game. People are dying. It’s easy to get wrapped up in emotion, but knowing there’s a bigger picture out there has helped me cope.”
Monroe is one of many seniors across the country whose seasons were cut short suddenly due to the coronavirus.
