No other sport in college athletics deals with the singular challenge that college baseball does – trying to divide 11.7 scholarships among 35 players, or more the last couple of years, and ensure that everyone gets at least a certain percentage. Not even soccer, which has 14 scholarships available for 28 roster spots, has that kind of restriction.
And no sport has seemingly had to jump through as many hoops to get changes to NCAA rules that would help the sport grow. Despite immense popularity, even something as simple as adding a third paid assistant coach to the staff at each school came up short in the final vote. So, trying to do something as crucial as increasing roster size, increasing the number of students on scholarship or eliminating the requirement that each player on a team be on at least a quarter athletic aid is time-consuming process.
“It's always hard to make meaningful change, and legislation’s difficult because, quite frankly, a lot of athletic directors don't understand the 27 student athletes on scholarship maximum, and they don't understand how the minimum 25 percent on scholarship works,” said Craig Keilitz, executive director of the American Baseball Coaches Association. “They simply don't. Sounds crazy, but when you’ve got 18-to-24 sports, it's hard to know every nuance in each sport and how it breaks down, especially in equivalency sports over headcount sports,”
That’s why the ABCA is doing the dirty work for the colleges. Recently, the ABCA surveyed its member coaches about their preferences for changing certain rules that proved to be popular during the 2021 season, where the NCAA relaxed some of its rules to make up for the lost 2020 season due to COVID-19. And the results of that survey will be discussed at length during the annual ABCA coaches’ convention in January in Chicago.
“From there, we will put the legislation forward with some sponsorships from a couple of conferences that will go into the legislative cycle, and it has to be in before September of 2022,” Keilitz said. “That will be voted on in April of 2023, then put into place for the 2023-24 school year if that passes. So, there's still a way for this. Changing legislation always takes time. Unfortunately, it's not easy. It's really hard. Getting an audience to really listen to it is difficult. And then anytime you have change, it's difficult.”
So, just what did the survey tell Keilitz and how will that influence the rule-change proposal? Let’s dive a little deeper.
Financial relief
In 2020, the NCAA did provide some help for college athletics – not just baseball – when it adopted legislation that exempted need-based and other merit-based financial aid awarded by schools that meets certain criteria from counting against the 11.7 scholarship limit. This allowed those student-athletes with exceptional academic standing to find other ways of paying for school and allow college programs to further stretch their scholarship dollars.
But the rules about requiring each student-athlete to receive a minimum of 25 percent athletic aid scholarship and the 27-man counter limit remained for college baseball, meaning coaches had to stretch that dollar in the other direction as well. The annual counter limit is the maximum number of players a team is allowed to have on scholarship, currently at 27 out of 35 players.
Overwhelmingly, the 181 ABCA-member coaches who responded to the survey favored eliminating the 25 percent athletic aid requirement – 63 percent for to 37 percent against. Similarly, 71 percent of respondents favored eliminating the annual counter limit. Breaking that question down further, 38 percent said they wanted to eliminate the counter limit altogether while 33 percent would be OK with expanding it to 32. In terms of the overall roster size, the feeling was split on whether to raise or eliminate the roster limit (54 percent) or keep it at the pre-pandemic level of 35 (46 percent).
For reference, for both the 2021 and 2022 seasons, the NCAA has raised the counter limit from 27 to 32 and eliminated the 25 percent athletic aid requirement due to the COVID-19 pandemic, while the roster size that was unlimited in 2020 will be capped at 40, a number that 31 percent of those who wanted to raise or eliminate the roster limit favored the most. Beyond that, however, the old rules will be in effect unless another blanket waiver is granted.
The numbers on the survey were about what Keilitz said he expected.
“You know, just talking to coaches, it’s interesting,” Keilitz said. “You talk to about 20 coaches over the different levels of Division I, and you get some pretty accurate numbers. When you send out the survey for all the coaches, it’s really interesting the way that comes back. We also see it in the survey results. If we survey 200 coaches, let's say by the time we get 50 back, their percentages on each question barely ever change.
“It was very interesting the way these results came back. They did not vary as much as I thought they would. That's probably the biggest surprise. I had Power 5 [teams] and [Group of 5], so their percentages stayed pretty consistent.”
Potential benefits
Keilitz said there are potentially several ways that decreasing the minimum 25 percent athletic aid and increasing the counter limit could not only help student athletes but the sport as well.
He said the sentiment from many coaches was that as long as the counter limit remains intact, then it shouldn’t matter how scholarships are divided. However, if the counter limit is eliminated, and a program could, in theory, carry 60 student-athletes, then the results of the survey might be different. The thought of carrying 60 seems far-fetched, but it does open another possibility.
“The other thing is that people really don't understand that much is this can be a money-maker for the program,” Keilitz said. “So, for example, there were quite a few schools that used to go to their administration and say, ‘Hey, if I carry five more kids, and each kid's paying $30,000 a year and they're walk-ons, that's an extra $150,000 that comes to the school. Can I use that money to supplement coaches’ salaries or travel budget and so forth?’ So, a lot of schools use their athletic teams not only as a marketing tool for the university, but also as to bring more kids to their school than would be there without that particular sport.”
One of the other big issues for college athletics, not just baseball, right now is the propensity for student-athletes to quickly transfer — i.e., the transfer portal — in order to gain more playing time or look for a better fit. Keilitz said he is unsure how changes in these rules would affect the current wave of transfers.
“When something's new, everybody thinks they're going to get a better deal someplace,” Keilitz said. “This was the first year on the modeling of the transfer situation. But there are a lot of kids that found out that they were in a Division I program wanting to transfer because they thought they could go someplace else, and there wasn't a spot for them. So, I think like anything new, you know, it's just people have to feel it out and figure it out.”
One thing is for sure: the COVID-19 pandemic and the changes it wrought on college baseball have certainly provided a bit of a test case for the impact of these rules and opened the door for their potential permanent adoption in the future.
“I think there's been interest for quite a few years, at least, to take a look at them and see if we'd have a chance to get these changed legislatively,” Keilitz said.
