New NCAA academic standards cause high school strife

The NCAA is raising academic standards for incoming freshmen. Some say it will hurt minority and poor students, while others say a lack of communication with high schools will harm more students than it helps.

In 2012, the NCAA voted to raise in 2016 the minimum high school grade-point average from 2.0 in 13 core courses to 2.3. Students must complete 10 courses from core curriculum in their first three years of high school. Once a core course is completed, a student cannot retake it for a better grade.

A jump from a 2.0 to a 2.3 GPA is a huge step for many, and some coaches argue many students are too far behind to make up ground.

“[F]or someone that's a late bloomer, someone that the light bulb doesn't go on until later, now it's too late,” said Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson III.

But Robert Smith, head basketball coach of Simeon Career Academy in Chicago and a supporter of the change, said the immediate problem is lack of communication.

“If you went to 20 academic counselors, I guarantee you 17 would not know about the rule changes,” Smith said, adding the NCAA did not sufficiently communicate the changes to high schools.

Simeon is a premier basketball high school. Its alumni include top NBA draft picks such as Derrick Rose and Jabari Parker. Both Rose and Parker played a single year of college basketball before entering the NBA draft. In the future, similar players who did not perform well as a freshmen or sophomores in high school, will lose a year of college eligibility. If a player is found ineligible, he will not be allowed to use the sidelined season as a red-shirt year.

Smith emphasized that city high school counselors are concerned with the requirements for graduating high school, not NCAA eligibility. He said keeping up with all the rule changes is too overwhelming for most counselors, and late bloomers are the losers.

“Kids get into high school and they don’t know the severity of not getting good grades. … It’s a big adjustment coming into high school and they get off to a bad start a lot of times,” he said.

The rule change will first affect students who become seniors in September. That means some high school students who started slow academically will already be ineligible for their freshman year of college.

“Not being able to make those classes up is kind of difficult,” Smith said. “I think a lot of kids are going to have a tough time.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.