Scholarship Endowments: Question for college coaches

Most Schools have a system by which donors or boosters can earmark monies for specific purposes. Contact your school's coach and/or compliance director to see how your gift can be set up under NCAA rules, to your liking.

If you are looking at developing runners in your immediate locale/general area/state who you desire to motivate to attend your alma mater, you should set up a specific endowment/scholarship based on very specific criteria. Working from the locale up, rather than the university down, may enable you to connect to the local athlete and coach to strive to meet your requirements and apply to your school. If you simply let your school use your money as it sees fit, this result may not occur.

Answering your question according to my school:

1. Can coaches actually use this? YES

2. Can it help in recruiting? YES

3. What is the minimum amount that could help, if it can at all? At our school a minimum amount of $5000 must be put down to create the endowment, then money in any amount can be added to the endowment

4. Can the coach use this endowment to recruit, does he have control of the funds or does some administrator control how it is used? Yes, the coach has control, here the person who creates the endowment can create some sort of criteria, such as, a female returning distance runner

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Great that you are thinking of providing support for our sport. Many thanks.

If the team is already fully-funded with scholarships (the NCAA limit) then your funds can not be used for scholarships other than to replace existing dollars. So my program is fully funded. If an alum gave me $20,000 in an endowment, the university would use the endowment dollars, and use the university funds set aside for athletic scholarships for something else. So if the program is fully funded they will not really see your funds, as they will be used as replacement. But hopefully the department would allow the coach the "freed" up funds for travel, equipment, etc.

As stated above, if the money can not be used for scholarships then it can be used for recruitment as there is no NCAA limit on that. I am doing just that now to someone who donated funds.

Each university has their own minimum limits. For our university they will not accept partial payments for scholarships. You have to donate $440,000 to endow a full scholarship or they won't take it. But I just got a $15,000 donation that i am using to fund equipment and team travel.

Again, I think that every university is different. Some coaches I know have free reign over donated dollars, while some have to check with administrators to use it. I have to get approval for mine, but that is more so we don't violate any NCAA rules on extra benefits.

Hope this helps.