AFCA 2009 CONVENTION UPDATE

More than 6,200 coaches gathered for this year's AFCA 2009 Convention in Nashville, TN. NATS staff showcased the continuing development of the program and presented a number of exciting new programs it plans to unveil in the coming year to convention attendees.

Of the subjects introduced, perhaps none was as well-received as the news to the 150+ BCS program operation personnel in attendance, that NATS would release a ground-breaking online academic support system aimed at familiarizing both high school student-athletes and school counselors around the country with the standard requirements as governed by the NCAA Eligibility Center in order for incoming freshmen to be cleared to play sports at the university level.

The product of a collaborative effort between the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) and the American School Counselors Association (ASCA), the NATS provided service program – dubbed Teammate-SC – consists of a number of internet-based tools which aide in providing student-athletes the means necessary to measure their progress in meeting the requirements put forth by the NCAA Eligibility Center. Included are a Core Course Calculator which calculates each respective student’s NCAA Core Course GPA, as well as an online database of the minimum ACT and SAT score requirements for all schools at the Division I and Division II level.

For school counselors, Teammate-SC offers the ability to track and save the academic progress of multiple students to which they are responsible all at one location and do so throughout the entire span of each respective student’s high school career. In cooperation with both the student-athlete and his/her parents, an academic profile template built into Teammate-SC can also be filled in by a school counselor, and then forwarded to college recruiters and coaches of prospective programs of interest for each participating student-athlete.

In order to maximize the impact that Teammate-SC is expected to have on both student-athletes and school counselors throughout the United States, NATS will be providing all 25,000 members of the ASCA and corresponding state counselor associations with access to the website at no cost. High school coaches will soon after be encouraged to visit with the counselors at their respective schools in order to become acclimated with the Teammate-SC program and better understand how their players can benefit from utilizing the program as an additional resource in the recruiting process.

As Dr. Richard Wong, Executive Director of the ASCA, points out, the NCAA is currently in its fourth year of an Academic Performance Program (APP) designed to strengthen the overall education experience provided to a student-athlete during his/her time on a university campus. Encapsulated in a numeric measurement known as the Academic Progress Rate (APR), colleges throughout America have been instructed through introduction of the APP to increase the performance of student-athletes in the classroom or risk losing up to 10% of those funds provided to the institutions annually in the form of scholarships. This being the case, a much heavier emphasis is now being placed not only upon the academic standing of student-athletes already in attendance at the university-level, but also of recruits who in the future will comprise new classes of incoming underclassmen.

It is this demand for increased academic achievement from those being recruited out of high school to play sports at the college-level that NATS felt it was necessary to create a user-friendly, online instrument such as Teammate-SC. Coupled with an already proven system of player evaluation as represented by NATS combines and an associated Online Player Database, Teammate-SC serves to provide participating high school student-athletes a valuable tool by which to gain a competitive edge in the recruiting process – and do so from a position that addresses not only athletic skill and ability, but success in the classroom as well.