Anyone experienced or heard of having a player rotating years on financial aid and baseball scholarship. Example would be scholarship the first year, then taking financial aid the next year, then back on scholarship the next and then financial aid the last (or vice versa in years)?
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Are you saying the net cost to the player would be about the same whether on academic or athletic scholarship, or would the amounts be appreciably different?
^ financial aid; not academic aid.
I can see how a family could do it - especially in a small self-employed business setting. You can shift costs and revenue recognition to reduce earnings and it's much easier to do this in contiguous years.
So long as the same FA rules are applied to all students, I can't see why not. (A legally enforceable agreement along these grounds would be another question.)
Also, a coach would much rather a kid gets FA dollars rather than use baseball money.
Sorry Goose, I misspoke, I did mean financial aid, not academic. Thanks for clarifying.
Interesting. No I have not. I have to admit, I'm somewhat skeptical of this scenario and you've caught my interest with your question. The concept of a baseball scholarship is tied to performance or potential in a baseball program relative to the other players. It is merit based, and a lot of times there are no guarantees unless agreed to up front.
Times have changed in the last 10 years with guaranteed scholarships. Even with these guarantees, this seems odd to me, and I'd really like to know what is going on here. If I'm a manager and I want to keep my best employees in my company, I'm not going to promise bonuses/raises based on the calendar. I'm going to offer bonuses and raises based on performance and contribution.
The other question becomes how does the college manage the financial aid process. Financial Aid requires FAFSA which is a Federal program unless the school is offering private institutional FA which is merit based to be coordinated with the baseball scholarship money. I got a lot of questions on this one. You may want to ask for clarification from the Coach on the mechanics of this.
Private institution offering the FA. I am asking the question as I have not also heard of an offer like this before also. I don't want to get into all the exact specifics but a couple of my thoughts were that the school may be trying to get creative with whatever scholarships they have left. By offering baseball money every other year and FA on the other years, they could also offer a similar deal to players but on the flip years. Also, if FA is the first year, then baseball money the second year, there is no NIL to be signed out of high school. Also by doing FA the 1st and 3rd years, and baseball money the 2nd and 4th years, they are possibly not having to pay a 4th year if the player gets drafted after junior year and signs (just a scenario). I am not sure the net cost would be the same as if there was baseball money all 4 years. The FA year is much lower than the baseball money year. So not sure if you then look at the baseball money spread out over the 4 years and compare it that way. It's hard to tell without knowing what a baseball money each year offer would be.
A lot of them are offering no scholarship money the first year and large scholarship money the second year, double what they would normally offer the first year, none the third year and double again on the fourth year. Logic is some graduate early, get hurt and can't play, or get drafted so they don't have to use the fourth year money and end up getting a guy for three years and only end up paying scholarship money for two years.
