NCSA College Athletic Scholarships Blog

Tennessee Basketball Coach, Bruce Pearl made waves yesterday with some controversial comments regarding the NCAA Academic Progress Report.  The APR punishes programs that don’t achieve certain academic results, but Pearl believes the fear of losing scholarships causes coaches to leave some perspective student-athletes behind.

“We don’t have enough time to sit here and talk to you about the APR,” said Pearl during a Big Orange Caravan stop Monday in Greeneville. “I think that it’s very well intentioned. I think there’s a lot of very positive things about it. But what it does very clearly is it discourages us from having diversity on our roster. It discourages us from taking students that are at risk.”

“Fortunately for this country, there’s a great deal of diversity and there are people from all different backgrounds and folks that have all different kinds of opportunities. Some are very well prepared coming out of high school. Some aren’t as well prepared.”

Not surprisingly NCAA President Myles Brand defended the APR.

“There’s room in the system to take risks, but only if you provide academic support for those prospects,” Brand said. “It’s not so much who you admit, but how much you are committed to those student-athletes’ academic performance while they are enrolled.”

My point to critics of the APR would be;  Shouldn’t all student-athletes be admitted to college based on some level of academic qualification?  Should a college really be accepting athletes they don’t believe can handle the classroom work?  Would a college hand out a scholarship to an exceptional music student with poor grades?  More importantly, shouldn’t a college want to reward prospective student-athletes with good grades?

Regardless of the answers to these opinion questions, the fact remains that the APR rules are in place and aren’t going anywhere.  Prospective high school recruits can seperate themselves from their peers with great grades and set a coach’s mind at ease that he won’t one day lose a scholarship due to a low APR.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 10:58 am and is filed under Academics, Athletic Scholarships, NCAA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.