NCAA approves extra year of eligibility for spring athletes,

The NCAA is giving athletes in spring sports across the country another year of eligibility after the coronavirus outbreak cut short the 2020 season.

The NCAA’s Division I Council voted Monday to allow athletes of all ages in all spring sports an extra season during the 2020-21 academic year. Seniors can return for an extra season and underclassmen won’t have this abbreviated campaign count as one of their four seasons of eligibility.

For the Miami Hurricanes, women’s tennis star Estela Perez-Somarriba has already decided she will return in 2021 to try to defend her 2019 national championship and Brian Van Belle, a right-handed pitcher for the No. 5 baseball team, will have the option to return and pitch a full season as the Hurricanes’ ace.

To account for the possibility of seniors returning for a fifth season, the NCAA also expanded the maximum roster size for baseball teams and adjusted financial aid rules to allow teams to allot more scholarships than usual. The NCAA will allow schools to determine how much financial aid will be given to players whose eligibility would have been exhausted following the 2020 season if not for the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools will be allowed to use the NCAA’s Student

Assistance Fund to pay for scholarships of athletes returning for an extra season in 2021.

NCAA rules give athletes five years complete four seasons of eligibility. The NCAA is also allowing schools to self-apply waivers to give athletes an extra year if the five-year clock has been exhausted.

“The council’s decision gives individual schools the flexibility to make decisions at a campus level,” council chair M. Grace Calhoun said in a statement. “The Board of Governors encouraged conferences and schools to take action in the best interest of student-athletes and their communities, and now schools have the opportunity to do that.”

The NCAA is not, however, granting an extra season of eligibility to athletes in winter sports. Most winter sports had completed the regular season at the time athletics were suspended, although several national championships — including for men’s and women’s basketball — had not yet been contested.

ETC.

● Soccer: In a letter critical of Barcelona club officials, Lionel Messi and his teammates said they are taking a 70 percent cut in salaries because of the shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The Barcelona players wrote in a social media post that they will also make donations so other club employees are not badly affected by the upheaval. “A lot has been said about Barcelona’s first team and the players’ salaries during the country’s state of alarm,” they wrote in the letter. “Before anything, we would like to make it clear that we have always wanted to reduce our salaries as we perfectly understand that this is an exceptional situation and we ALWAYS were the first ones to help the club when it asked.” … Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko is proudly keeping soccer and hockey arenas open. The Eastern European nation of nearly 9.5 million even started a new soccer season this month as coronavirus cases rose. “It’s better to die standing than to live on your knees,” he said.

● MLB: Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo wants a different style of baseball when the sport resumes in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. “When it gets all going,

I’m sure you’re going to see a lot of crazy ideas thrown out there,” Rizzo said. “But I don’t think anything is crazy at this point when it comes to starting back up and scheduling, traveling. Rizzo wants to make baseball “as exciting as we can,” adding that if play resumes in 2020, players want to play as many games as possible, even if it means playing doubleheaders.