Oklahoma Sooners: NCAA extends eligibility for 2020 spring sports athletes
By Chip Rouse
Oklahoma Sooner student-athletes who compete in spring sports received some positive news on Monday at a time when life as we know it come to a virtual standstill because of the grim onslaught of the coronavirus.
The NCAA Division I Council has voted to allow an extra year of eligibility for college athletes participating in spring sports. This extension applies to all student-athlete classes, not just seniors, who were participating in their respective sports this spring before their seasons were cut short by the nationwide coronavirus threat.
This means that OU athletes like softball players Giselle “G” Juarez, Shannon Saile and Nicole Mendes, baseball players Brandon Zaragoza and Jason Ruffcorn and golf seniors Quade Cummins and Garrett Reband will have the opportunity to extend their careers and return for the 2021 season.
The same will not be true for Oklahoma seniors in winter sports, such as basketball, gymnastics and wrestling. Eligibility extensions were not granted for athletes in winter sports, ostensibly because participants in these sports programs were able to complete most, if not all, of their seasons.
As a result, Sooner fans unfortunately have witnessed the end of the sensational college careers of Kristian Doolittle in men’s basketball and Maggie Nichols in women’s gymnastics.
As in any decision like this, the devil is in the details. For one thing, financial aid rules are being adjusted to allow college sports programs to carry more student-athletes on scholarship to account for the new incoming recruits and the seniors being allowed to return for an added year of eligibility.
While the NCAA Council vote allow seniors in spring sports to return for an extra year, one of the sticky points is it does not require the schools to provide the returning seniors with the same level of financial aid they were receiving in 2019-20. The Council is giving the schools the flexibility to make decisions like this at the campus level.
Schools will have the ability to use the NCAA Student Assistance Fund to pay for scholarships for student-athletes who take advantage of the eligibility extension.
While most everyone associated with college sports agrees that granting the eligibility extension to college athletes involved in spring sports is the right thing to do, it also sets up another potential concern.
“The (transfer) portal is going to light up like a Christmas tree,” Sooner softball coach Patty Gasso said to the Norman Transcript and other local media earlier in March.
“Because you have seniors returning, and maybe I’m a kid in waiting, and now this player is back, and I’m waiting a whole ‘nother year. There’s a lot of situations that are going to be happening depending on how this is gonna go,” she said.
There are certain to be other ramifications from this decision. We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg. It will be interesting to follow this as it plays out over the remainder of this year and next.