Division 2 Soccer Scholarships

College sports is big business, even when it comes to soccer. Competition for NCAA Division I soccer scholarships is intense, as is the competition on campus at Division I schools. Successful soccer players who want to continue their careers and get help paying for college can also look to Division II schools, which offer almost as many scholarships as Division I programs. Division II schools are usually smaller, sometimes private universities where the pressure to succeed athletically is less prevalent than at Division I schools.

  1. Women's Programs

    • NCAA Division II women's soccer is considered an equivalency sport when athletic scholarships are awarded. NCAA scholarship rules define some sports as headcount sports in which scholarships have to be given as full rides to individual athletes. Others are equivalency sports in which programs can spread their grant money to more players, thereby helping more students with the costs of education. Full-ride scholarships are rare in equivalency sports, but a school can give some help to more of its athletes. Each women's soccer team is allowed to have a total equivalent of 9.9 scholarships allocated at any time. That money is often divided among 15 or 20 scholarship athletes. Among the 225 women's Division II programs that awarded soccer scholarships in 2009 were Grand Valley State in Michigan, West Florida, California State Dominguez Hills, St. Rose in New York, Colorado School of the Mines, Metro State in Colorado and California State Los Angeles.

    Men's Scholarships

    • Congress passed Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 to fight discrimination on the basis of sex in education, including in sports. Schools need to provide equal access to athletic scholarships to men and women. Football, a men's sport, uses a significant percentage of the available men's scholarship funds, so in most sports that have both men's and women's teams, the women have more available scholarship money than the men do. Soccer is one sport in which that is the case. Men's Division II soccer is also an equivalency sport, and its schools can allocate the funds equal to nine scholarships at any one time. Full-ride scholarships are available but rare. Among the 176 Division II schools offering men's soccer scholarships in 2009 were Fort Lewis in Colorado, LeMoyne in New York, University of Tampa, California State Dominguez Hills, California State Los Angeles, Drury in Missouri and Colorado School of the Mines.

    Transfer Students

    • Players who begin their soccer careers at Division I schools do not always finish there. A soccer player who wishes to transfer from a Division I school often will accept a scholarship at a Division II program. Transfers within Division I need to sit out either one or two years before playing, but Division I transfers to Division II schools can play immediately.