Underclassmen high-school athletes are hard pressed by colleges to “verbally commit” to their school in hopes of securing their future team roster. But what happens when the coach you committed to retires, moves to another school or finds a more prospective athlete?

Verbally committing to a college’s coach is non-binding for both parties, which means the aspiring athlete can find a better fitting team or school; but this is the same for the coaches who can reject you even previously having a verbal agreement.

I think that if the colleges put such a huge emphasis on getting a commitment from undergraduates, they should put an emphasis on honoring these commitments especially if the athlete is serious about joining the team roster.

For full acceptance, you need to get a signed National Letter of Intent (NLI). These NLI’s signal a commitment to participating National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) colleges and universities in the U.S., and can only be signed at the beginning of the athletes four year institution.

This promotes the more prepared students to seek out more than one college as a fall back option, even at the own risk of not being accepted to any of them and getting left behind holding a dream and a promise of  the team coach telling them they were in.

Verbal commitments are a coach’s way of bypassing the NLI age requirement since they can recruit athletes as young as freshmen, four years before they can even think of signing the real deal NLI. I feel like this shady on the part of the coaches that know most freshmen haven’t even thought to what they are going to do senior year of high school yet alone what they are doing for college.

And some of you reading this might say, “Well that’s their own fault,” but how could you blame the victims of a predatory athletic practice that has gone unchecked for so long on the basis it opens up career paths for young and upcoming athletes, without the guarantee they even get this so called benefit?

When parents attend verbal commitment ceremonies (events colleges hold to entice prospective athletes to commit to their school as underclassmen usually through the “hat system”), they may jump onto the opportunity not thinking they can get something better down the road.

But when you find a better school and opt out of your non-binding verbal agreement, it can tarnish your reputation with other schools and potentially make it hard to get signed onto a team.

Colleges have their own reasons for making the agreements non-binding. They need to fill slots and may find a better performing athlete that fits their team criteria. But this shouldn’t hinder those who went out of their way to try setting up their future as an athlete who get rejected on the whim of the college sports coach.

I believe that if the NCAA made the written commitment time frame about as early as the verbal

commitment time frame, then many more athletes and aspiring competitors would have less of a problem depending on the verbal commitment that colleges can dismiss as a miscommunication if they decide the athlete isn’t what they initially wanted.

Basically, having the option to get your name out to a college is nice, but when you can be dropped like dead weight depending on whether or not you are deemed worthy in the four years between your “commitment” and the opportunity to get a contract is worth more than miscommunication; the execution seems to be off the mark.