Grade point average for athletes

Here is the thing...I am a head coach at a high school in Illinois....and we have some kids on our team that are not the brightest bulbs in the world, but they play their hearts out for me, the assistant coaches, and their teammates. If we had that 3.0 mandate, I would not be able to field half a team. This past year, we had honor roll students, AP students, and below average students on the team. My problem arises with the mandate that athletes (football players or other athletes) to have a 3.0 or a "higher" g.p.a. than the average student because what are the consequences it has. Like stated earlier, some of these students, this is all they have and it might be the onlhy thing that forces them to even succeed slightly in the classroom....make it harder for them to play and now they might not try at all when they realize they can't achieve that 3.0. Also, the average "Joe" who doesn't do anything in school except show up, smoke in the bathroom, and leave can get his high school diploma with a 1.0 (D average) but the kid who is trying to contribute gets penalized for not having a 3.0. Doesn't seem fair!!!!

In wisconsin we have the city of milwaukee. It is the land which time has forgot in many areas. Milwaukee is known for Beer, very good high school basketball and very low education.

A couple years ago the head basketball coach and milwaukee pulaski instituted that you needed a 3.0 to play basketball. I was met with great dislike by parent, school administrators and teacher. the theory was it was too much to ask of the players. heck for most just having a 2.0 was great.

Fast forward, milwaukee pulaski has a winning team and students with 3.0 grade point average.

the moral of the story is, if you have high expectations, players will meet them regardless of the enviroment. If it can be done in milwaukee, I can be done anywhere.

as I say, give me 11 rudys with a 3.0 and we will win a confrence championship every year cause we will out think you, out scheme you and you hustle you.

I perfer smart players on defense. defense is more about being in the right position and the right time then any thing else.

look how competitive virgiana and boston college are. you have to be smart to go to those schools.

vanderbilt is beating up on sec teams in basketball. you have to be super smart to attend vanderbilt. no exemptions like duke has.

A 3.0 is absolutely ridiculous. Say goodbye to those 7 wins.

We have a 2.0 rule and I have mixed emotions about it. On the one hand a 2.0 isn't very hard to reach and it has forced the guys to be more serious about academics. On the other hand, as others have pointed out, football may be the only thing that keeps the kid going to school. If football is supposed to teach life lessons than why exclude the kids who most need those lessons?

I agree with the notion that high expectations will be achieved if expect it, and it's worked toward and encouraged.
My biggest problem with it is that the 3.0 is a district standard, not a team or even a school standard. I just think there can be too much variation from team to team, not to mention school to school for this to be a standard for all.
It's similar to saying the whole district should run the 33 on d and shotgun zone read on offense. what if you don't have the "talent" to do it?
The same goes for a district GPA plan. I would argue that ANYONE can attain a 2.0 in High School. Some people aren't capable of a 3.0. And that's O.K. The coach in Milwaukee saw a way he could help kids, and he clearly has. He took the time and energy to support the kids and help them. Let's say a district institutes this. Unless that district is going to provide more $ for coaches or teachers that can help tutor and support those kids that want to succeed, then there is more of a burden on the coach or coaches to get the kids through/on the field.
If the coach doesn't have the time/ability/staff to help, then all you've done is take something away from the kid that works his tail off for the 2.5.
Again, I think it's a good idea for an individual team and coach, but I just don't think it can be blanketly applied to an entire district, even if the district is 1 school.
Again, just my random, rambling opinion.

I hate to burst your bubble, but the admissions requirements for scholarship athletes and the admissions requirements for regular students are two entirely different things.

As long as all calculus students are required to run a sub 4.6 40 and squat at least 400... I'd be fine with it.

fatkicker brings up a good point about the future of many of our athletes. We do have some future scholars on our team... we have a lot who will enter the workforce right out of HS and do not really need to do B level work on a series of Elizabethan Sonnets for their job at the hog confinement.

While I did graduate from college with honors (7 years of college down the drain...), I don't think I was ever above a 2.5 in HS (it is possible that I was not as serious then....)

While I can see that students must be passing or may have no unexcused absences from school as a reasonable mandate, a 3.0 for some kids is VERY difficult to achieve. Plus, with a grading mandate like that, might it discourage prospective players from enrolling in challenging classes? Why take advanced biology, or calculus when you might risk your eligibility? I sure would have thought that way as a HS student (I still think that way now a lot).

I argue this a lot here- if the purpose of school is solely to prepare students for college... then it is a prep school. At a public HS our scope is quite a bit broader- we need to prepare a student to enter Harvard, we need to prepare a student to enter the military, and we need to prepare a student to be able to work on a construction site right after graduation. GPA only seriously influences one of those post-graduation choices, so it sounds like a fairly limited and narrow minded view of the purpose of school.


^{the moral of the story is, if you have high expectations, players will meet them regardless of the enviroment}

While I agree with this in theory, I know that if we did this here some would not make it. In our particular case, our school has a very tough grading policy. We've have not had a student with a 4.0 GPA for several years (a lot of D/F students who move or transfer find they are A & B students at neighboring schools).

If the bottom line is 3.0 than the concern is with the bottom line only and not the process... but education should be about the process as much as (or more) than the end result. I'm sure if I needed a 3.0 to play football, I would have done it... and in my case I would have just had to screw around less... and probably not take Russian and drop advanced Math (where the problem was emotional immaturity more than anything else... a freshman in a class with junior girls...my focus was not necessarily on the math work). But I had the ability to do well - a person like me could have been motivated by a mandate like this. Some student-athletes we have try hard to get Cs and Ds (kind of like I had a hard time being fast... I never made ANY 40 yard dash requirements at my position... and I worked my butt off).

Our district (1 HS in the district) did something similar (not as extreme), and while the bottom line IS an improvement, students are taking fewer challenging courses and athletic participation is the lowest it has been in years here (which is more due to the general apathy of some of our students... but had probably been influenced a little by this policy), so the change seems to be little more than a cosmetic improvement.

A lot of my kids would have to do without football. We do have higher expectations, but 3.00? I can see a basketball team having said requirement- they only need a few guys and they are usually elite. Football is a game of numbers. You need some Joes and Bubbas and thye need football. There are different kind of smarts and some of you alluded to those.

rudy had a 3.0 gpa or he would not have gotten in. the min. gpa for transfer students is 3.0 to get into notre dame. you can go to the website and click on transfer student admission requirements.

<sup>when coaching in college, I saw the single greatest academic motivator ever created....(in my opinion). MANDATORY BREAKFAST CHECKS. Prior to our staff coming in, there were 47 athletes who needed to attend classes in the summer to be eligible (Nobody was watching the team between old staff out and new staff in...) All team members had to be in the cafeteria eating breakfast at 6:55 am. Each athlete checked in with the coach on duty. 2nd semester we instituted that any player with a 3.0 or better was excused from breakfast check. 3rd Semester we had 35 out of 65 scholarship athletes with greater than a 3.0 GPA.

Could something like this...a mandatory teamwide even that everyone dislikes be instituted, and then those with over a 3.0 are rewarded.....be done in H.S.</sup>

I would think so. Although this is not really the same, we have a mandatory football study hall at 6:45 AM for ANYONE on the down (D & F) list. In our situation, a player with all Ds can play, a player with any F can not, so we try to address it before it becomes a problem. In 5 years we've only had one player who ever had an F heading in to a week, so it seems to help a lot.

How do you handle bus riders?