College Recruiting Exploited

College Recruiting Exploited

Even though many colleges won’t admit it, they will do everything in their power to gain advantages over the competition when recruiting prospective students. Whether it’s building new facilities, hiring more teachers to have a better student teacher ratio, or increasing police staff to ensure safety, universities will pay the extra costs to have a competitive edge. One of the biggest factors that make one school stand out from the competition is athletics. Athletics can bring a school national recognition which will therefore increase profits and student applications. Athletics have become such an important factor for both universities and coaches that many coaches illegally recruit just to get an upper hand. Illegal college recruiting is a serous issue that has been going on for over 50 years and has created a ripple affect on both students and universities.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) set up strict guidelines that both players and coaches must follow in order to allow every university a fair chance in recruiting a high school athlete. Each Division in college sports has its own specific recruiting rules that they must follow in order to ensure nothing illegal goes on. The NCAA has its own website with detailed rules for both athletes and universities to ensure they both know their rights when being recruited and recruiting. For instance, in Division 1 Football recruitment, a coach is only allowed to make telephone calls once per week after September 1st, but they are allowed unlimited calls during the contact period. While in basketball coaches are allowed to make phone calls twice per week beginning August 1st. For each sport the contact periods and guidelines change depending on the season in which the sport is played. Regardless of these strict policies that are enforced by the NCAA coaches are still illegally recruiting players to help themselves and their universities. (ADD CITATION from articles)...