This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Sports

Making College Recruiting More Transparent

A bill before the Connecticut General Assembly aims to make it easier for student athletes and their parents to understand scholarship offers.

The state legislature is considering a bill that would require coaches at state colleges to fully disclose the fine print of athletic scholarships to recruits. This is a fine idea even if it amounts to fighting a swarm of bees with barbecue tongs.

When government gets involved with athletics the results are usually clumsy, and this is no exception, but a clumsy attempt at educating high school students is better than no attempt at all. At least, kids coming to Connecticut schools would know what they are signing up for.

To be fair, the abuses HB 5415 would address are not commonplace in Connecticut, where there is only one big-time football program and its fans are sated with eight wins and a thumping in a BCS bowl. This bill is actually needed where it will never be implemented, which is down in the Southeast Conference, where rabid fans demand victories and coaches wishing to remain employed offer more scholarships than they have, like an airline overbooking a flight.

Find out what's happening in Manchesterwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The coach banks on the fact that some kids just aren't going to show up. If the coach miscalculates and too many student-athletes do accept, the school simply withdraws its offer, sometimes just a few weeks before the first semester. The unlucky would-be student-athletes who are dropped usually have to wait and entire year before finding another school that has a spot for them.

This is a morally repugnant approach to take with teens who are making one of the most important decisions of their young lives, but the NCAA, always keen to hand out parking tickets during a riot, says it's legal. So that's: Texting = Illegal; Destroying A Future = Legal.

Find out what's happening in Manchesterwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Anyway, these are problems we don't have. There are seven Division I basketball schools in Connecticut that would be affected by such legislation, but the world of college basketball recruiting, muddy as it is at times, is a preschool picnic compared to college football.

Put another way, Tyler Olander, the former E.O. Smith standout who is playing at UConn, should know that Jim Calhoun is going to recruit the best players he can find and if one of them is better at power forward, Olander will lose minutes. But losing minutes isn't the same as being stripped of a scholarship and sent packing.

And Olander can be certain the other benefits a scholarship is supposed to bring are there for him.  He gets better medical care than a Congressman or a Canadian and his road per diem is better than that of most newspapers.

But most high school athletes who go on to play in college don't play on national TV. Most will only be getting partial assistance and many will get none at all. Others will get a Division II grant-aid package, which is an even murkier world than that of scholarships. So this is legislation that would affect high school athletes from Tolland and Ellington and Enfield and Manchester and ever other town where kids play high school sports.

The bill before the legislature is worthy of consideration. There is nothing wrong with telling young people straight out what they can expect when they enter the world of college athletics. Done properly, it might even become an advantage for Connecticut-based college coaches who can sell it as the kind of straight-talk a recruit won't get anywhere else.

But area athletes need to remember that even if this bill becomes a law, (and oh, it hopes and prays that it will) the protection will stop at the state border. The real burden is on athletes and their parents to ask questions and demand answers from the coaches who come into their homes selling a school and a program and a family atmosphere.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?