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One thing that I've been wondering since this was announced was how it would affect our teams versus other teams. Stanford (along with most other Power 5 schools) is not exactly starved for resources, and shouldn't find it too overwhelming to fund additional needed scholarships. That said, donors everywhere just had a big bite taken out of their portfolios, and they may not be as receptive to a request to fund some additional temporary scholarships as they might otherwise be.
But beyond the question of how we pay for it, there's the question of whether current seniors in spring sports want to come back for another full year. I'm less of an expert on other spring sports, but for women's tennis, I can't remember the last time we had a fifth year player. Like most of their fellow students, they graduate after four years and they move on. Do Emily Arbuthnott and Emma Higuchi have jobs lined up? If so, are those jobs still going to be there in the current economic situation? Is there a co-term option they're interested in pursuing, or a more traditional master's or PhD program? (Arbuthnott, for one, had a 4.14 GPA as an Economics major at the end of last year, so presumably she's still roughly around there. I'm not sure how many undergrads our Econ PhD program accepts, or if they ever accept anyone, but if it could materialize, to get an Econ PhD from Stanford while playing another year of college tennis is a pretty amazing situation.)
There's also the disruption to the team dynamic, as women's tennis has a pretty straightforward conveyor belt. 8 scholarships, and ideally you have it set up to be two a year. So, allowing for freshmen who might jump over someone else in the lineup, you theoretically have two seniors, two juniors, and two sophomores in the lineup, with two freshmen waiting in the wings, all on scholarship. Lather, rinse, repeat, year after year.
But if you start having fifth-year players in the mix for the next few years, what does that do to the team dynamic? Recruiting? Playing time, like in any sport, is a brobdingnagian deal in tennis recruiting. If all of a sudden you have ten scholarship players and you might not see the court regularly until your junior year? And instead of two younger scholarship players that might potentially jump you in the lineup, it's four?
Don't get me wrong, it was the right call, and I'm glad the NCAA made it. But like anything in life, making the right call doesn't mean there aren't any consequences that flow from that decision. Just different ones.
Imagining our roster next year, and while it's a good problem to have to have so many good players available, there are going to be some players who deserve to play who are ticked off they're not playing:
5th years: Emily Arbuthnott, Emma Higuchi
Seniors: Michaela Gordon, Janice Shin
Juniors: Sara Choy and Niluka Madurawe
Sophomores: Angelica Blake and Nicole Mossmer
Freshmen: India Houghton and Ana Geller
What do you even do there? Does Higuchi even have a role? I would see it as (1) Gordon, (2) Arbuthnott, (3) Blake (though I bet she'd jump Emily with another year under her belt), (4) Choy, (5) Houghton (she's a real one), and (6) Shin. Maybe. But Madurawe has proven she belongs in the lineup, and Higuchi sure as heck has, too. Injuries happen, and you can never have too much depth, but I might prefer one or both of Arbuthnott or Higuchi moving on with their lives after this. Every scholarship player on this roster is good enough to play singles on this roster. Yes, everyone gets a fifth year to potentially let the logjam work its way out, but the deal that was sold to recruits is no longer the deal we're able to offer. And perhaps most importantly, if you're not playing matches, you're not developing nearly as quickly as you would otherwise. (One possible solution that's unique to college tennis: have the ITA relax enforcement of its roster rules so that teams can cycle through a number of players more readily than they can currently so that playing time can be distributed a bit more broadly than it can now.)
With the economy looking the way it is, I'd expect a bumper crop of grad transfers across college tennis for the next few years. A lot of Stanford student-athletes getting co-terms. If the job you'd hoped for isn't there right now, might as well build your resume and play tennis to pay for it while you're at it. I'd expect this to primarily benefit mid-majors or lesser Power 5 teams, as teams like UNC, Stanford, and UCLA can't really get much better than they are, but a senior who's stuck at #5 at Stanford might find the idea of playing at the top of the lineup at, say, Columbia (and thus testing yourself against other teams' #1s and #2s instead of their #5s) a more attractive option than being buried in the lineup here.
