NCAA ELIGIBILITY CENTER. FORMALLY CALLED THE NCAA CLEARINGHOUSE.
To be declared eligible for participation in NCAA sports, all athletes must first be cleared through the NCAA eligibility center. All athletes must go to the eligibility center website and will out a series of online forms that ask you various questions ranging from your personal background to your sports participation and, of course, your academic records. The eligibility center is available to all athletes at the high school and college level and is the only way for an athlete to be academically cleared to play at the NCAA level.
The eligibility center can be accessed by visiting eligibilitycenter.org at any time during the day. The site will ask you to fill out a series of forms pertaining to your high school athletic and academic records. You must then pay a $65 registration fee and your online application is complete. The next step is to have your high school counselor send your transcripts to the NCAA eligibility center and your registration is completed. You will then need to contact a college coach and have your name placed on an Institutional Request List. Once placed on this list, the NCAA will process your request and you will be eligible to play at the college level.
To fulfill the eligibility center’s graduation requirements, you will need to maintain a certain level of academic performance while finishing your high school career. To be cleared through the NCAA eligibility center, all athletes must maintain a high school GPA of 2.00 and achieve a minimum score of 820 on the SAT or 18 on the ACT. Because the NCAA uses a graduated scale to evaluate athletes, the higher your high school GPA, the lower your standardized test scores will have to be to gain entry into a particular university. The eligibility center will evaluate your entire high school career, starting with your freshman year. Each year of college you will be reevaluated for eligibility, so keeping your grades up once in college is still as important as it was in high school.
The eligibility center is also a valuable resource in keeping an athletic checklist of exactly what it is you need to accomplish in order to achieve your dream of playing college athletics. The site offers a search engine which gives details about every NCAA sport and which schools offer them. The site also offers a resource page which frequently asked questions concerning the selection process, initial eligibility and a list of high school courses that must be completed before you may qualify to be cleared by the eligibility center. The site also details such vital information as the differences between the various NCAA divisions. The NCAA has three divisions based on the size and endowment of the university.
Once you have completed your online registration and made contact with a college coach to be placed on an IRL list, you will be eligible to play sports at any NCAA college in the country. The college recruiting process can be a fun and exciting time for any high school athlete, but without the proper tools and know-how, it can often be scary and downright confusing. For this reason, athletic marketing companies such as athleticscholarships.net can be critical in helping you sift through all the information that will be coming your way during the recruiting process. We have an experienced team of recruiting coaches who have worked with hundreds of athletes from all over the world, and our comprehensive database of more than 12,000 college coaches gives us a direct line of contact with the athletic departments of every college in the NCAA. Our expertise in the field of college recruiting is vital in making you a more attractive athlete to college coaches. Having received financial aid offers for more than 85% of our clients, we have the track record and the experience to get you where you want to go in college athletics.
