No scholarships, no championships
Ryan Garner
A quick look at the pennant wall in the gym reveals a sombering statistic. It’s been a long time since MCC has brought home a pennant.
Upon deeper inspection, the cause of MCC’s disappearance from the national championship podium might owe some credit to an archaic scholarship regulation that made its way into the books, back in the late 70’s.
“The last national championship we had, was in 1979, for Track and Field,” said Todd Bolser, MCC’s Sports Information Director, “In those days, we were a jury district, a power house, we were the largest school then, and still are today.”
However, in 1977, the District Athletic Counsel established guidelines that would slowly drain the vitality from the Thunderbird sports program for the next three decades.
“We cannot seek recruitment out of Maricopa country, we cannot recruit international students, and we cannot scout talent out of state,” said Bolser.
This trifecta, combined with the fact that MCC is restricted from offering anything more than the measly $325 talent award to its athletes, means that the rest of Arizona’s college sports programs receive by and large, the lion’s share of most of the athletic talent.
“When the rules were put in place in the 70’s, it was meant to create parody. Well, it’s 2012 now. And the teams that we compete with in our conference, and those that fall under the bigger umbrella, the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA), have an edge when it comes to student scholarships.”
The sports program didn’t just realize this either. According to Bolser, the drought and scholarship issue has been popular in school news, as far back as 2002, when previous coaches had “spent a good deal of time voicing concerns over the lack of balance in the district scholarship program.”
“Not to say that we haven’t been close to bringing home a pennant,” said Bolser, “since some of our sports teams are actually moderately successful, like basketball. But it’s been difficult to level the playing field when other schools are allowed much greater recruitment and scholarship opportunities under much less scrutiny.”
Sam Ballard, Men’s Basketball Head Coach described the scholarship process for his team, saying, “We are allowed to give out 12 ‘talent scholarships’ which are basically $325 a semester.”
“We are the only Maricopa school that plays in Division (1A) so we are at a severe disadvantage, since other division one schools (that aren’t in our geographical district) are allowed to give full rides to their best players.”
According to Ballard, there are five other colleges in Arizona that fall in our division;
“Western, Cochise, Central, and Eastern. And each of them gives their players a full-ride (room and board, books and tuition). Each of these schools has the option to award up to ten scholarships of this nature.”
“What we’ve asked for is for them to at least allow us to fund raise. They won’t allow us to give out money for aid, at the level of a Division 1A school, so we asked, ‘can we at least fundraise the money ourselves to compensate for the lack of support that our student athletes need to be competitive.'”
“We’ve even got athletes who are financially struggling that show up to practice hungry,” said Bolser, “…and thanks to these regulations we can’t even feed or legitimately take care of our players. So how will we ever hang another banner with things as basic as student nutrition lacking?”
This situation is definitely a disadvantage for our dynasty, and to be honest, I’m surprised that this isn’t more of an issue to the sports department and to the players that are essentially playing out of their shorts to compete with full time ‘paid’ college players.
