MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Last week, the NCAA ruled that it will allow scholarship spring athletes to receive another year of eligibility after the sports calendar was wiped out due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
All classes, including seniors who would have played their last seasons in 2020, will have their eligibility clock extended. As a result, no one will miss a year of eligibility due to the unforeseen situation with coronavirus.
But while the NCAA made the decision, it will be up to individual institutions to determine how scholarships will work and how money will be distributed. With incoming freshmen mixing with seniors who decide they want to play another year, scholarship limits will have to be increased.
Schools do not have to offer returning seniors a full scholarship, and between WVU’s five spring sports — baseball, track and field, tennis, rowing and golf — there are 18 total seniors.
WVU athletic director Shane Lyons said the athletic department has yet to decide how it wants to handle scholarships if any of those 18 student-athletes want to play again in 2021.
“I know some of my sport administrators have been in discussions with athletes that would be returning,” Lyons said. “It’s a matter of us sitting down with the student-athletes. There’s the initial emotion, ‘I want to play another year.’ If they’re going to finish their degrees and graduate, is their hope to come back next year? We have to have those conversations now and figure out from that standpoint how we move forward. We’re really at the front end of this, and we’ll be making decisions of what that looks like in the coming weeks.”
If schools decide not to offer matching scholarships due to financial reasons, this will affect all current student-athletes when the time comes. All current athletes who are not seniors will get that extra year, but may have to pay their own way if they want to play all four years.
WVU is taking a financial hit due to missing spring sports, but Lyons also noted the school is saving money by not playing. There are no travel costs or the need to staff home games and meets.
However, if every senior does decide to come back, it will likely cost the school about half a million dollars.
“We’re probably looking at $450-500,000 in additional expense if all of those student-athletes returned,” Lyons said. “That’s something we’ll have to look at. The overall financial picture… we continue to look at it every day and see what it means. It’s all just a lot of unknowns at this point.”
