The NCAA Volleyball Scholarship Rules

The National Collegiate Athletic Association works to ensure fairness between schools in the recruiting and signing of athletes and also protect high school athletes during the recruiting process and their college careers. To do that, the NCAA has established some strict rules regarding recruiting and scholarships at all of its institutions. Violating these rules leads to punishment that can include forfeiting games, losing future scholarships or even the shutting down of programs in extreme cases.

  1. Recruiting Rules

    • The NCAA has a strict set of rules that tell coaches and recruits when recruiting can take place and what type of recruiting can be done. In general, the sending of emails back and forth or phone calls are allowed at almost any time, but visits are restricted at certain times of year. There are three periods defined by the NCAA, and different months and seasons are designated into one of these three categories. The first is an open contact period, during which coaches may visit players and go out to watch them play without restriction. The second is a quiet period. This is a time when players may visit college campuses, but the coaches are not allowed to leave campus to do recruiting of any kind. The final period is called a dead period. These are times when any kind of recruiting is a violation. The open recruiting season is generally from Jan. 1 through the end of July for volleyball.

    Division I Scholarships

    • NCAA Division I women's volleyball is classified as a head-count sport. That means each scholarship must go in its entirety to one student-athlete. Each university is allowed to have12 scholarships allocated for women's volleyball at any one time. Division I men's volleyball is categorized as an equivalency scholarship sport. The dollars allocated to the 4 1/2 men's volleyball scholarships a school can have in place at any time can be divided among more than four or five athletes to get some aid to more players.

    Division II and III

    • NCAA Division II volleyball is a scholarship equivalency sport for men and women. Division II women's programs can spread the dollars for up to eight scholarship equivalents across multiple athletes, while the men's programs have 4 1/2 equivalents. Division III schools do not have volleyball scholarships, but they are allowed to recruit athletes almost year-round and work with their schools to get academic scholarship awards to deserving students to help get those athletes on campus.