Recently disgraced track star Marion Jones did it. So did struggling NFL quarterbacks Eli Manning and Matt Leinart. Of course they’re not the only sports superstars who chose to red-shirt in college.
Many elite professional athletes chose to “red-shirt” in order to save their four years of NCAA athletic eligibility. Leinart, the currently-injured quarterback for the Arizona Cardinals, took only one 2-credit class during his fifth year at the University of Southern California: ballroom dancing. Yet he was able to continue competing in collegiate athletics and led the Trojans to the BCS title game where they fell to the Texas Longhorns.
Red-shirt is the term used to describe athletes who attend classes and practice with the team but do not compete for one year of college, thereby saving one year of eligibility to compete. Athletes may choose to red-shirt for a number of reasons. For example, freshmen football players often red-shirt because they likely wouldn’t play anyway due to their inexperience and size. They spend the year learning offensive and defensive schemes and building muscle mass. The term “red-shirting” comes from the red jerseys normally worn on a practice field.
Red-shirting in the Ivy League is not nearly as prevalent as at other more athletically-inclined colleges. According to track coach Nathan Taylor, only one in 100 track athletes will stay for a fifth year.
“Most kids won’t use it because they’ll either have to graduate or will want to get on with their lives,” Taylor said. “They’re not uni-dimensional athletes.”
In fact, the Ivy League doesn’t even refer to red-shirting as red-shirting. Instead, an athlete’s fifth year is called a “medical fifth year” or a “leave-of-absence fifth year.”
Senior Adam Jacobs, a catcher on the baseball team, is currently in the middle of the application process for a medical fifth year. Jacobs sustained a wrist injury during his sophomore year and has been in the process of applying for a fifth year since then. He had to have the team trainer prove that his injury was legitimate and get NCAA approval. Jacobs is now waiting for the University registrar to sign off on his fifth year.
“I still have to prove to the University registrar that regardless of the fact that I have eligibility for a fifth year, I would have been here academically anyway,” Jacobs said. “That’s been the part I’m working on.”
While the University of Southern California let its star quarterback literally waltz through an extra year, Ivy League schools have strict policies regarding academic status and athletics. If an athlete has enough credits to graduate, he or she must graduate. This prevents any Leinart-esque ballroom dancing situations.
Sometimes it can work to the detriment of the athlete. Cornell’s first national champion in track in over 50 years, triple-jumper Rayon Taylor ’07, finished his coursework in just three and a half years, and he had one year of eligibility left since he didn’t compete his freshman year.
“I think he would have loved to stay here,” Coach Taylor said. “But he had to graduate.”
Taylor said that of the few athletes who do choose to compete for a fifth year, about half do so because of an injury and the other half because of academics.
“I’ll recommend it if kids miss a semester or change majors late in the game,” Taylor said. “Sometimes they just want to take advantage of everything that Cornell has to offer.”
Senior lacrosse player Ashleigh Smith took her sophomore year off and knew that she wanted to squeeze as much lacrosse out of Cornell as she could. She had too many credits to attend Cornell for the whole year, so she’s finding other interests to fill her time while waiting for lacrosse to start back up.
“I started the process in the fall of last year because I knew I had an extra year of eligibility,” Smith said. “I could either load it up and try to take all my courses and graduate last spring, but I decided that I really wanted to take advantage of my time at Cornell, and for me the best part of Cornell is being a part of the Cornell lacrosse team, and I wanted to extend that experience as much as possible.”