Shady or Common Practice

If a player is on scholarship is it common practice that the other parents split that players dues? If that is common practice are the other parents made aware they are paying for the scholarship-ed player?

soccertruth wrote:If a player is on scholarship is it common practice that the other parents split that players dues? If that is common practice are the other parents made aware they are paying for the scholarship-ed player?

In my experience, it's very common.  However, different clubs handle it differently.  The club my dd played most of her career with didn't offer any kind of scholarship for players.  If a team wanted to scholarship a player, the cost was divided up among the payers.

I haven't looked at a fact sheet in a few years, but we used to be required to state how many scholarships in the sheet that was supposed to be given out to everyone.  There was no requirement to identify those players or define how much of a scholarship, just how many.

There was no secret on our team of how many scholarships, and frankly, everyone quickly figured out who the scholarship players were.  Their parents were always the ones that refused to volunteer for anything, or fill any duties at out of town tournaments, because they had so many other committments.

In 7 years of academy/select, I don't think my DD's team has ever scholarshipped a player, so I can't directly comment on that.

What I can say, is that I was a team manager for her team at 2 different "big" NTX clubs, and both clubs built their team budgets and based their team dues based on a roster size that was 1-2 players less than the max roster size for the age group (i.e. at U11/U12 the budget was based on having 15 full paying players vs. max roster of 16, at U13/U14 the budget was based on having 16 full paying players vs. max roster of 18, etc...).

The "extra" roster spots were at the discretion of the coach.  If those spots were filled, the coach could either use those spots to provide full or partial scholarships to players on the team, or the coach could fill those spots with regular full-dues paying players, and the money from those players would go into the team's "discretionary" funds that could be used to pay for extra tournaments, indoor rentals, coach travel expenses to OOT tournaments, etc.

To my knowledge, my DD's team has always gone the route of having all players paying full dues and using the extra money for discretionary funds.

My point being that at least 2 of the big clubs in NTX build scholarship opportunities into their team budgets, such that players on a team with a scholarship player wouldn't be paying any different fees than the players on a team without a scholarship player.

However, the team with the scholarship player may have less "discretionary" budget, so in that case, the rest of the parents really are still paying the way for the scholarship player in some way, shape, or form.