Athletes like UK outfielder Renee Abernathy with high grade-point averages are now eligible for academic bonus payments. (Photo by Vicky Graff)
Colleges now have the option to pay athletes up to $5,980 per year as a reward for academic performance thanks to a federal ruling in August, 2020, that was upheld by the Supreme Court.
According to ESPN’s Dany Murphy, only 22 of the 130 FBS-level schools have plans now to provide academic bonus payments to athletes and nine of those schools — Arkansas, Auburn, Florida, Kentucky, LSU, Missouri, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee — are in the SEC. Notice that Alabama, Georgia and Texas A&M don’t have plans in place even though all three schools never seem to have a shortage of money to spend, especially on football.
Schools have also taken varied approaches to which athletes will be eligible for the bonus payments. Some schools will offer the bonus payments to any player on any of their rosters, while others plan to offer bonuses to scholarship athletes only.
I talked to several UK athletes and parents of athletes. Most of them did not know about the proposed bonus. One who did said it was her understanding that “pretty much every SEC school paid about $2,900 per semester for a GPA (grade-point average) of 3.5 or higher) the first semester.”
She said athletes at some other SEC schools were surprised when she told them UK athletes had yet to receive any academic bonus money.
“I am assuming maybe Kentucky is just going to pay at the end (of the school year),” the UK athlete said. “But we have not heard that for sure. We just don’t know. It’s a really good incentive to keep grades up and people are going to appreciate knowing that if it happens but so far it has been kept really quiet. I hope somebody knows what will happen and will tell us.”
Not every Division I athlete is on full scholarship as several sports have to split scholarship money to have enough athletes to field a team. Some are also walk-on athletes with no scholarship money and some depend heavily on academic scholarship money.
“Schools are now permitted to provide financial awards for academic achievements by their student-athletes. It is up to each school to determine its own standards for awards – for example, maintaining eligibility, reaching a certain GPA, earning conference honor rolls, progress toward graduating, achieving graduation, etc,” Tony Neely, assistant athletics director for athletics communications and public relations, said.
“UK Athletics plans to make awards for academic achievements and we are in the process of determining the standards.”
Hopefully for the sake of UK athletes wondering what might happen the standards will be determined sooner than later so payments can be made this academic year.
With the amount of money SEC schools receive each year from the conference, it certainly seems like funding should be available. It’s great that UK plans to have a plan, but if other SEC schools are already providing those academic bonuses then it should be time for UK to do the same.
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You can read Murphy’s full story here.
