410 Forum — Opinion
More Road Games Could Mean Lower GPAs
By Jesse Venn
The amount of games that the UNC baseball team plays does not only affect their win-loss record, but it also affects their academic records.
Baseball teams play a lot of games. That is how it is, how it has always been and how it will always be. But college baseball teams do not have athletes on the roster, they have student-athletes. The key word is student. The Bears baseball team had its first game on the 20th of February and will have its last game on the 22nd of May with about 70 percent of those 64 games away from its home field. How can a university expect these student-athletes to meet their potential in the academic department as well as the athletic department when they are on the road for most of the spring semester?
College baseball has had a problem with its players’ grades slipping during their season for some time now. A new rule has been introduced to address this persistent problem. In every collegiate sport, the student-athletes have to have a grade point average that meets the school’s requirements to participate. At UNC, the GPA has to be at least 2.0. For every sport, other than baseball, the players only have to be eligible for the preceding semester in which the sport is played. But the grades of the baseball players all over the country slip so much during the season that the NCAA has made it mandatory that they must be eligible all year long. Many people speculate that the low grades are because of the huge amount of time that baseball teams spend on the road.
This new rule is a step in the right direction. And other strategies are being used to help the baseball players’ grades. The players take their homework with them on the road trips and have tutors to help them when they get back.
“One of the main things that we try to help the baseball players with is time management,” said James Henderson, assistant athletic director for academic success. “Our budget doesn’t allow us to send tutors with the team, but we help utilize them when they are here.”
Another thing that may help the Bears is that starting in the 2010 season the team will be joining the Great West Conference instead of being a part of an independent league. This will give the Bears more home games. And that means less time on a bus and more time at home because as a part of a division-I conference, a certain amount of home games are guaranteed. Having more home games should help in the classroom and on the baseball diamond. As of May 6, UNC is 6-5 at home and 6-28 on the road.
“We travel more than any other team in our league. It’s tough to win games when you are never at home,” head coach Kevin Smallcomb said.
The new eligibility rule is not the only thing that the NCAA has implemented to help with the academic scores of the baseball teams around the country.
The NCAA recently adopted an academic reform package aimed at academic success. According to the NCAA Web site, the centerpiece of the reform is a way to measure student-athlte eligibility.
The measurement, known as the Academic Progress Rate, is a point system. The points are based on student-athletes being eligible and the more often the players are eligible, the higher the APR score is. The bench mark for a modest score is 925. The national average for Division I football is 966. The average score for Division I baseball is 913. This means that baseball players are not meeting the required GPA with much regularity.
My problem with the APR is that it only records the problem. There are no rules that make a team meet a certain score, it only documents the score.
The answer is a simple one and as much as nobody wants to hear it, I will say it: fewer games.
