Not to mention the role the transfer portal plays now where instead of bringing in a freshman you simply grab a grad student from another program.So, here's my take on allowing the extra year for these players. It's really more of a math thing, so it's a good estimate.
I looked at five local D1 schools with softball programs to see how many players they carried as grad students. Only one school had no grad students, one had one, one had three, one had four, and the last had five. That's a total of 13 girls playing an extra year that under normal circumstances they wouldn't have. Granted, it's a small sample size, but that is an average of 2.6 extra girls for each team.
If you then multiply 286 × 2.6 you get 743.6 extra players in D1. The question I have is did they take away a spot from someone else, or did the team just increase their roster size to accommodate the extra players? Did they take away a potential scholarship from another girl?
The class of 2024 is the first one not dealing with this, so they could get recruited later than we've seen over the last several years. Maybe the Ivy league schools did it right by not allowing the extra year. Their take was your here for an education first. Athletics is secondary.
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