In order to be eligible to compete in college sports at the NCAA and NAIA levels, you will need to register with their respective Eligibility Centres at some point. It is recommended that you register as you enter your junior year only if you know for sure that you will be playing at either level.
The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics is the organizing body that oversees college athletics for its member schools. Schools who are members of the NAIA are made of smaller colleges located in the United States and Canada. The NAIA was established in 1952, as an organization to establish competition between colleges. The NAIA sponsors 13 different sports and runs 23 annual championships for those sports, in both men’s and women’s athletics. The NAIA has different member schools than the NCAA, and have different Eligibility requirements as well. To make sure you are eligible to compete at an NAIA school, you need [...]
The tests you need to take depend on what collegiate level you want to play. NCAA Divisions 1 and 2 require that you take either the SAT or the ACT. For D1 and D2 schools, the NCAA Eligibility Center uses a sliding scale to see if your standardized test score is high enough. The minimum SAT score to be eligible for combined critical reading and math is a 400, accompanied by a 3.55 and above GPA. The NCAA doesn’t look at the critical writing section to decide eligibility, however most individual schools do consider it during the admissions process. Just because [...]
This is a document published by the NAIA to help educate student athletes about the recruiting process. Download for free on the NCAA website.
Because soccer is regarded as a ‘fall sport’ this means that competition takes place between August and around November time depending on how was your team progresses in the regional and national tournament. That being said, most players fly out for pre-season training at the start of August and then come home for a month during the Christmas break after the end of the Fall semester. Spring semester runs from January until May time. During that time although it is regarded as off-season training and scrimmage matches still take place regularly.
In order to be academically eligible to compete in the NAIA, you have to meet certain requirements set forth by the NAIA Eligibility Center. The NAIA’s academic requirements are different than the NCAA requirements, so make sure that you don’t get them confused. In order to be eligible for the NAIA as in incoming freshman, you need to meet two of the three following criteria: - A minimum score of 18 on the ACT or 860 on the SAT (970 after April 2019) - An overall high school grade point average of 2.000 or higher on a 4.000 scale. - Graduate [...]