Originally Posted by
Olympic Fan
This is absolutely wrong.
The NCAA has a heirarchy of sports to prevent schools from evading the scholarship limits in the major sports by giving them scholarships in the non-revenue sports.
If, for instance, a player on a track scholarship plays football, he counts against the football limit. If a tennis player (on scholarship) plays basketball, he counts against basketball. Football trumps everything -- if Greg Paulus had ever gone out for football, he would have counted against the football limit, not the basketball limit. Basketball is second on the list.
Don't know Steve Johnson's scholarship situation with track, but if he gets anything, even a partial, it counts against basketball's limit. Back when Jay Heaps was a soccer all-American and a basketball scrub, he counted against basketball.
That applies to being a recruited athlete on an athletic scholarship -- if you're recruited in any sport, it counts against football or basketball (if you play those sports).
The question of recruited or non-recruited athlete IS very important when it comes to financial aid. A kid that is on financial aid, as opposed to an athletic scholarship, can come out for football and basketball and not count against the limits IF that person was non-recruited -- in any sport -- by that school.
The difference between an athletic scholarship and financial aid is simple -- the former is an award given solely for athletic prowess; the latter is given to meet financial need.
While it's common to break up athletic grants in non-revenue sports, in the two major sports, scholarships are almost always full grants -- covering room, board, tuition, equipment and a few other carefully defined items.
I would be surprised if very many financial aid students get as much as a kid on a full athletic scholarship. At least when I was in school, there was a formula, depending on your family income ... it was assumed that your parents would contribute a certain amount of their income/net worth to the total. I'm sure there are some kids so poor that they get everything from financial aid, but I can't imagine a middle-class family escaping some payment, even for the richest schools.
Indeed, the way the financial aid tables work, a family would pay just as much out-of-pocket to put a kid through a cheap school such as ECU as through an expensive one, such as Princeton ... it's just that in the first case, the same family contribution might cover 50 percent of the cost, while in the latter case, it would cover less than 10 percent of the cost.