NCSA College Athletic Scholarships Blog

Anytime you receive an offer you should be excited and thankful. Make sure you express this to the coach. At this time you have two options – accept the offer or tell the coach you need more time to explore other options. Here are some outlines to use:

“Coach, thanks for the offer; this is really exciting!”

If you accept:

“I definitely want to be a part of the program and accept the offer to attend your university. What are our next steps?”

If you need additional time:

“At this time I am not ready to make a decision. I want to talk this offer over with my parents and/or I want to visit a few other programs before making a decision. Is there a time I need to make a decision by?”

The key  is to determe the timeline of the offer. In some cases, the coach will give a student-athlete 24 hours to make a decision. Other times, a coach says the offer is on the table indefinitely and that they will not budge until they hear your decision. This will vary per program and their recruiting process.

Making a commitment to a college program is a life changing decision.  You want to be 110% sure about any commitment to a verbal scholarship offer. Remember, coaches want a student-athlete that is fully committed to their program.

Lastly, take in to consideration that a coach can verbally offer other student-athletes at the same time. Nothing is binding until you sign a National Letter of Intent and thus if another athlete accepts the same offer before you do, it is theirs!

For more information about this topic, feel free to check out an older post from Coach Taylor here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 5:07 pm and is filed under Athletic Scholarships. 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.