Athletic Aid Agreements are Athletic Scholarship Contracts
Most athletes think a National Letter of Intent is your scholarship. That is not the case. The actual scholarship contract is known as an Athletic Aid Agreement. This contract outlines how much your scholarship will be worth and covers what you must do in order to keep your scholarship. Each school is slightly different, but below is an explanation of each section of these contracts.
Conditions for Athletic Scholarship Eligibility
You need to be a student of the school, meet the NCAA eligibility standards and also meet the guidelines set forth by each school’s student athlete handbook. The conditions section covers a wide range of topics from NCAA eligibility to meeting the strength and conditioning guidelines. Most of the terms in this section cover what you must due in order to get your scholarship, not necessarily what you need to do to keep it.
Determine you NCAA eligibility here
The Terms of Your Scholarship
This section will tell you exactly how much you scholarship will be and what it will cover. For example, some partial scholarship will only cover tuition or only books. There should be no surprises here; the terms of your scholarship are usually discussed before you are sent an official copy to sign. Another important note is that if you are given an athletic scholarship, you generally are not allowed to accept any other scholarships.
What Will Cause You to Lose Your Scholarship
The most important section of the contract is the section that discus’s how you can lose scholarship. This section covers a lot of different scenarios, most of which will never happen. However, they almost all reference something about a schools code of conduct. These codes of conduct are usually very vague and all encompassing, allowing coaches the opportunity to pull a scholarship for disciplinary reasons. Typically, coaches do not just pull a scholarship from an athlete without several meetings and generally that athlete is aware their scholarship is being pulled.
Understanding the Athletic Agreement is not necessary until the final steps of the recruiting process. The most important thing is that you find schools and coaches you are interested in playing for and allow them several opportunities to evaluate you.
Here is an example of an athletic aid agreement for a major D1 school
Example of a National Letter of Intent
How to get an athletic scholarship
Author: David Frank
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