Numbers Limiting Division I Access Via Community College Route

Proposition 48 is becoming something of a Catch-22 for high school football players who don’t make the grade academically and go the community college route, area coaches say.

After being forced to a community college, a student may find that the Associate of Arts requirement of Prop. 48 and the new 25-per-year football scholarship limit imposed on four-year schools by the NCAA prevent him from obtaining a Division I scholarship.

Prop. 48 mandates that a community college player accepting an athletic scholarship at a Division I school first obtain his Associate degree. In most cases, earning it keeps a potential recruit tied to a community college campus for two full years.

That doesn’t sit well with the four-year college coach, who wants his new players present at spring drills.

Community college coaches are trying to work around this, often unsuccessfully, by becoming academic counselors, pushing the kids into the right classes and into summer school so they can graduate a semester early.

But there is another problem--economics. With the new 25-scholarship ceiling, even four-year schools previously reliant on such transfers are now sticking to shopping at high schools instead.

Why? Spending scholarships on players who will be around for only two years, instead of on high school athletes, simply is no longer attractive.

Claude Gilbert found that out. Gilbert coached at San Diego State for 14 years and has coached at San Jose State for the past nine. At both, he built relatively successful football programs with community college transfers. He’s now taking a second look at that strategy.

“When the NCAA lowered the overall scholarship limit to 25,” Gilbert said, “it kind of caused us to do some decision-making. If you rely on JCs, essentially you’re running a two-year program, and (now with the 25-scholarship limit) you can’t get the program to be competitive at a level which our schedule demands.”

So more and more scholarship offers go to high school players--and don’t think area coaches haven’t noticed.

“A good (community college) program used to place 16 kids (with Division I teams),” said Bill Kinney, coach at Southwestern College in Chula Vista. “Now 12 of those kids might get scholarships, plus half of them aren’t from true Division I schools. They’re from St. Mary’s or Northridge.”

Added Len Smorin, coach at San Diego Mesa: “It’s a trickle-down effect. Say the USCs are giving five less scholarships to JC players. Well, that’s five more players who will go to WAC schools, and that’s five more players who will then go to Big West schools.”

And Tom Craft of Palomar College in San Marcos said, “I’ve seen certain schools that might want to recruit a Prop. 48 athlete back off, but then (the player) ends up getting an offer somewhere else, at a smaller school.”

To Kinney, the drop in the number of scholarships offered to his players is somewhat ironic, because the imposition of Prop. 48 meant better athletes have been enrolling at Southwestern.

“Because of Prop. 48, we’re getting some kids we normally wouldn’t have gotten,” Kinney said.

That’s not true all around. At Palomar, Craft said the quality of players has not changed and, at Mesa, Smorin said the quality of his recruits has been on the decline. But, he said, that’s because city high school football programs are currently on a down cycle compared to North County and East County programs.