April Brings Big Rule Changes
The NCAA was active this April, approving two major changes that affect high school athletes. The NCAA isn’t known for having a quick or agile approach to rule changes, so to have two useful rule changes in the same month is quite the feat!
The first rule applies to all sports, as the NCAA has eliminated the “5 official visits” limit for student-athletes. For those of you unfamiliar with official visits, let me break it down.
Essentially, official visits are visits by an athletic recruit to a specific university, and the university pays for the trip. A recruiting tactic used across the NCAA, we hear about it mostly in FBS football and Men’s Basketball because those are the only two sports our media is capable of following on a standard basis. For as long as I can remember, student-athletes were limited to five official visits during their recruiting period, which forced some students to take unofficial visits (the student pays for themselves) to closer universities in order to use their official visits on longer trips. For families in lower-socioeconomic households, this could hinder some recruits’ opportunities to explore all of their college options if they were to run out of official visits and not be able to afford a trip to school #6 and beyond.
This rule won’t change much for many recruits because most student-athletes are not asked to take more than five official visits. That said, student-athletes who have earned interest from multiple schools now have the opportunity to visit all of the interested programs.
Two clarifying points, student-athletes are NOT allowed to take an official visit to the same school multiple times. The only exceptions to this rule are if there is a coaching change - which then re-opens that school’s visit opportunity - or if the student-athlete is a men’s basketball athlete. Men’s basketball allows two official visits so long as the visits don’t occur in the same academic year.
You can read about the rule change in its simplest form HERE
The second rule applies to DI baseball, and it pushes back the date of contact allowed to or from a recruit until August 1 of their junior year.
Baseball joins a swell of other sports, notably softball, in pushing back the contact start date in an attempt to curb the growing issue of early commits in college athletics. As with any rule, coaches have been sliding farther and farther away from the guidelines to the point where middle schoolers and freshmen are getting verbal offers from large universities in an attempt to lock up a recruit before deciding whether to honor that verbal offer or not later in their high school career. An ongoing issue, families struggle to manage the recruiting process in a healthy manner, and this rule is intended to give recruits and families well-deserved space as they navigate high school and explore their recruiting opportunities.
This rule has been retroactively passed, so all student-athletes who are in contact with coaches now as sophomores will no longer be getting contacted until August 1.
You can read more about this rule change HERE, although they’re going to ask you to subscribe for the full story. It didn’t affect FBS football or men’s basketball, so not many major markets picked up this rule change.
