If you live in the United States, chances are you have heard about this topic a lot these past few months. It has been all over the news, not only for college sports fans, but across all national TV channels, even the ones who do not typically cover sports. So here is what happened:
In the fall of 2024, the NCAA (to the surprise of most people) all of a sudden announced some of the biggest rules changes in college sports history. They implemented what they call the “roster limit rule”, which basically means that every roster at the NCAA Division 1 level, will be limited to a certain number of athletes. For example, golf teams will only be allowed to carry a maximum of 9 players, tennis teams will only be allowed to have 10 student-athletes, while soccer teams will be limited to 28 players per roster. Another change that was announced at the same time, was that these numbers were also the total number of scholarships that can be given, so up to 9 full scholarships for a golf team, 10 for tennis, and as many as 28 full scholarships for a soccer team. While this might seem great at first glance, the problem is that a lot of college programs were caught off guard by this decision and simply do not have the money available to take full advantage of this change and offer more athletes full scholarships. To many people, especially to coaches, the timing of this decision was very unfortunate, as it was just too late and with very little time left to make major adjustments for the 2025/2026 school year.
On top of that, a lot of coaches were put in very delicate situations as all of a sudden they needed to reduce their rosters to those numbers. In golf, for instance, a coach with currently 12 players on his team, now all of a sudden needs to get rid of 3 players before the start of the next school year, which has led to many very uncomfortable conversations between coaches and players. And quite frankly, when a coach recruits an athlete, that player typically gets recruited for 4 years at that school, and just showing him or her the door after a year or two, is not what college athletics should be like!
Now luckily, the Supreme Court of the United States jumped in earlier this year and is currently working on getting this new rule overturned or at least delayed by a few years. Their reasoning behind it is that no student athlete should be forced to leave his or her school in the middle of their degree just because of some new rule that was suddenly implemented, especially since those athletes did not know anything about this possibility when committing to their current school. At this point, nobody knows how this is going to play out, which again has put college coaches in an extremely difficult positions, as they have had to put all their recruiting on hold, not only for this fall, but also for the class of 2026.
Now, we understand that this is a very complex situation with a lot of moving parts, but the NCAA will need to figure this out sooner rather than later. All we can hope for right now, is that a final decision is made pretty quickly, so that everyone involved has clarity and so that coaches can start moving forward with their recruiting. We talk to coaches on a daily basis, and we get the same feedback from basically all of them. So hopefully the NCAA recognizes that soon and comes up with a solution that works for everyone, but most importantly for all those student-athletes out there who are just looking to play college sports and get a great education!