Imagine you’re an 18-year-old star athlete. You have five — FIVE — free trips to colleges of your choosing in which you’ll be hosted by older athletes, many of whom are well-versed on how to show recruits a good time. You’re free and clear from your parents and again, you can take five trips and leave behind whatever cold, boring, or small town or city you’re from to whatever college campus extends you the opportunity for an official visit.
Depending on how much you love having Mom and or Dad, or your legal guardian in your life, the opportunity to take five vacations away from the ‘rents may no longer be a staple of the recruiting process as the NCAA announced it is lessening recruiting restrictions on official visits.
Thanks to proposal 2015-52, which was passed almost unanimously, schools will now be able to pay for the round-trip costs facing the parents and/or legal guardians of recruits. Previously, schools were only allowed to pay for the expenses of the recruits themselves. If parents, coaches, friends or any other guests wanted to accompany recruits on their official school visits, the NCAA required them to pay their own way.
This new rule will lift the prohibition on schools paying for any travel-related costs for up to two guardians accompanying recruits on visits. The rule specifies that funds can go towards travel expenses and food.
For an organization dealing with a lot of negative press regarding its recruiting rules, this decision is a positive step for the NCAA.
The new NCAA rule allowing FBS schools to cover parents' expenses/official visits helps everyone, particularly schools with national reach.
— Cecil Hurt (@CecilHurt) April 19, 2016
One of the main concerns with the banning of satellite camps was that it would limit the opportunities for recruits to get a taste of a coach and/or program they would otherwise not be exposed to. For example, a recruit living in Georgia might draw interest from far away schools like Oregon and USC, but be unable to easily interact with these programs outside of taking an official visit. This rule will at least lessen some of the burden on those recruits looking at schools far outside their backyard. Instead of traveling across the country by themselves to avoid a financial burden, recruits will now be able to bring their guardians along for the ride.
Of course, this does not completely resolve the lack of exposure concerns — recruits are still limited to just five official visits — but it does provide at least some relief.
The rule will officially be implemented on August 1, just in time for the Class of 2017.
This is good news for recruits who like traveling and making big decisions with their parents or guardians, but probably bad news for many recruits who hid behind NCAA regulations to have five fun trips away from Mom and Dad.
