The race for the brawniest and brainiest is on.

Ontario universities — the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier among them — are breaking new ground in their efforts to attract top-rated student athletes. Come September, for the first time ever, they will offer athletic scholarships of up to $3,500 to qualified freshmen.

Currently, such scholarships are offered in Ontario only to returning students. Giving scholarships to entering students represents a bid by Ontario universities to attract athletes now being lost to universities in other provinces and the United States, where freshmen scholarships are common.

It’s a scenario that could create a financial windfall for eligible students and their cash-strapped parents. The schools, meanwhile, must scramble to find scholarship funding.

To be eligible, students must carry at least an 80 per cent average coming out of high school.

Seventeen of Ontario’s 18 universities are expected to offer the scholarships. Trent University in Peterborough appears to be the lone holdout.

The scholarships work like this: Students can receive up to $3,500 annually — about 76 per cent of the average cost of undergraduate tuition and fees in Canada — if they maintain at least a 70 per cent average through their sophomore years and beyond.

Wilfrid Laurier was a vocal opponent of athletic scholarships for freshmen before shifting positions last year.

“We are aggressively going into it because we don’t want to be left behind,” said WLU’s athletic director Peter Baxter, whose school teams were competitive under the old system, racking up national championships in football and women’s hockey in 2005.

“Last year, I voted for it on behalf of the institution. I took a big swallow and said: ‘OK, we are in the game now.’ ”

The University of Waterloo voted against the rule change a year ago, along with Trent and the University of Windsor, due to financial constraints.

UW’s position at the time was that first-year students didn’t need the extra burden of performing on the playing field as well as in the classroom for fear of losing their scholarships, UW athletic director Judy McCrae said.

But, fearing that its varsity programs would be left in other recruiters’ dust, UW abruptly reversed its position last month.

“For the University of Waterloo, we wanted to remain competitive even though we’ve lost the principle of the thing. I don’t think it’s fair to our student-athletes, our coaches and our programming to fall behind,” said McCrae.

The academic component was something that the Ontario schools would not budge on.

Creating a system like the one in the U.S., where athletes are sometimes students in name only, held zero appeal to the Ontario University Athletics conference, which instituted the scholarship rule change, said WLU’s Baxter.

Laurier, he said, takes pride in maintaining the classroom performance of its varsity athletes. Recent statistics indicated that WLU’s student-athletes typically carry a 72 per cent average, the same as the rest of the student body. Laurier’s student-athletes also boast a graduation rate about six per cent higher, at 89.8 per cent, than the rest of the student body.

“The academic standard is paramount,” said Baxter. “At the end of the day, we are responsible to make sure these student-athletes graduate.”

The next step for Ontario’s universities is to figure out how to pay for these renewable scholarships.

Because Laurier plans to compete in the scholarship game against established OUA powers with huge alumni bases, such as Western Ontario, the University of Toronto and Queen’s, Baxter said the Golden Hawks will have their work cut out for them raising funds, up to $350,000 per year to finance these new athletic scholarships.

To make ends meet, some schools, such as Brock in St. Catharines, have already cut varsity teams.

So far, Laurier and Waterloo have no immediate plans to do likewise, administrators said. Laurier has already organized golf tournaments, alumni events and luncheons to find new funding sources.

Canadian Interuniversity Sport, meanwhile, has established various per-team financial caps for the athletic scholarships. For instance, a football team can offer up to $126,000 per season in scholarships, to be divided any way, up to the $3,500 maximum per player.

The CIS has also mandated gender equity in scholarships.

While other Ontario universities have had a running start on freshmen scholarships, UW is playing catchup on the recruiting trail because of the school’s recent policy change, said Dennis McPhee, UW’s new football coach.

“Sure, we lost a couple of kids (recruits). Every university has its own crosses to bear.”

While some Ontario high schoolers will always be tempted by the bright lights and big cities of Division 1 schools south of the border, the new scholarships have already lured others into staying.

Rick Osborne, the women’s hockey coach at Laurier, said he recently filled the six vacant spots on his roster with his top six choices — all eligible to receive scholarships due to their grades.

Most of the six — including Trenton’s Katherine Shirriff and Heather Fortuna of Kitchener — turned down full rides to U.S. schools to study and play at Laurier.

While the students benefit from the new athletic awards, OUA member schools are left trying to feed and care for the monster they’ve created.

“Yeah, it’s added workload,” Baxter said. “Right now, the barn door is open. Now, we’ve got to make sure that all the universities are playing by the same rules.”

crivet@therecord.com

FINANCIAL HELP IS OUT THERE

Students can get more information on academic awards and bursaries through high school guidance counsellors, financial-aid officers at the universities of their choice, or on a post-secondary school’s website. Visit scholarshipscanada.com for more information.

INSIDE

STAYING AT HOME AN EASY CHOICE - E3

Information from: /www.therecord.com

This entry was posted by Taman Siswa on Wednesday, June 6, 2007 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Education News, Scholarship. Tags: Scholarship, Student, Study, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.