Guidance Is Critical For College Prospects

As our Core Golf Junior Academy has grown, we have been fortunate enough to have some of our juniors play well enough to be on the radar of some U.S. college golf coaches and eventually get noticed to the point of being offered and receiving golf scholarships.

All of these juniors have shown a great desire to work hard and do the necessary things, such as writing SATs, playing well enough to get a decent playing resume and registering with the NCAA clearing house etc.

One of the areas that often gets overlooked is what they need to do before they graduate in order to be eligible to accept a golf scholarship at the school of their choice.

Cases in point are two students we had last year who accepted golf scholarships, one at a great NCAA Division I school in Jacksonville, Fla., and the second in West Virginia.

The Jacksonville junior was as set to go to this Division I school only to learn at the 11th hour that he was academically ineligible.

He was fortunate enough to find a junior college at the last minute who was looking for a player. It was good for the school because it got a player who was clearly better than it would expect to sign, but not so great for our junior, who had the opportunity to attend higher class of school with increased competition.

The story for our other student was that, after being at the school for close to a month and right before he was set to play his first tournament, he found out he was ineligible but fortunately the school elected to keep him on scholarship.

Now, he must “red shirt” for the first season in order to stay at this school, meaning he can play and practice with the team, but can’t travel or compete in any tournaments with the team.

In both cases, what happened was the NCAA did not accept certain classes that the students took during high school — a night class taken in grade 11 by one and not enough core classes by another.

We are also learning that, if you don’t graduate in four years, you cannot play Division I NCAA golf – you can play Division II and NAIA, but not D-I.

This has prompted us to hire and bring on a gentlemen to assist our juniors. He specializes in not only the rules of the NCAA, but just as importantly, helps in placing these juniors at the right school academically, as well as ability wise.

Every one of our juniors would like to go to a nationally-ranked program such as UNLV or N.C State, but the reality is that these bigger schools have much tougher competition just to qualify for events among their teammates and so many talented juniors have gotten lost in these programs.

I am a big advocate of being a big fish in a small pond where you can be guaranteed of playing in the majority of events and given the opportunity to grow and mature as a player without the stress of huge expectations.

U.S. college golf is a great experience and one I would recommend to anyone who wishes to try to attain that opportunity, but I highly recommend getting connected with someone who can guide athletes through the NCAA maze that seems to be getting more complicated and challenging all the time.