NCSA College Athletic Scholarships Blog

As a college coach there are many steps you can take toward becoming more knowledgeable about the financial aid process at your school. This will help recruits better understand the types of aid your school can offer and will allow you the opportunity to be an advocate for your recruits.

One important step is to know your school’s different types of financial aid awards. Meet with someone on the Financial Aid staff to begin building a list of each type of grant your school offers, how much can be awarded to a student, and what the qualifications are to become eligible for that grant. The more information you have, the better you can begin building the potential financial aid award for the students you are recruiting. These different grants can be things like a $10,000 Presidential Scholarship given to students with a 3.2 GPA or higher or a $5,000 grant for students intending to major in Elementary Education. There are countless possibilities and the more information you can provide to families, the better they will feel about the opportunity at your school to receive funding.

Another important financial aid topic to get better educated about is the appeals process. Not many coaches know how to guide a family through making a financial aid appeal. Sometimes the award letter does not cover as much as a family would like and they may be interested in appealing that decision to see if any additional aid is available. You can be a huge help to families as a coach by knowing how your school prefers to receive appeals, what types of information they take into consideration, and typically how long the turnaround time for a decision may be. By talking with a member of the Financial Aid Office staff you can find out if your school prefers a written request, or if and email or phone call will suffice. Ask too, if there are any circumstances such as offers from other schools, decreased expected income, or medical expenses that your school will consider when determining how much to award a family appealing their financial aid award. Although you may not go through this process with every family, this can be valuable help for those who may be just a couple thousand dollars away from feeling comfortable accepting your school’s offer.

Learn more about other ways that NCSA can help college coaches recruit Nationally, Cheaper, Smarter and As a Team

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 3:56 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.