By Will Vandervort.

To take care of their athletes

When Clemson begins paying it student athletes a stipend under the new full-cost of attendance legislation passed on Jan. 17, it will give them somewhere around $800,000 a year.

How did the athletic department come to that number? It didn’t. Clemson University did.

Through the help of IPTAY, the $800,000 Clemson will give to it students starting next year is based off a formula the university uses to divvy up its financial aid packages to its non-student athletes. In fact, every school across the board in the NCAA’s Power 5 Conferences has agreed to do the same thing.

This is one way in which each institution keeps everything at a level playing field, while keeping an eye on a booster who might be a little too eager to help out.

“There are a lot of good and very intelligent people pushing for the right collegiate athletic model,” said Clemson pitcher Patrick Andrews, who was one of the 15 student athletes chosen to attend and participate at the NCAA Convention in Washington, D.C. last weekend. “Student athletes everywhere should be grateful for the kind of people we have representing us.”

Clemson’s head-count sports will be paid $3,608 a year, while the non-head-count sports, will receive amounts that are proportional to the terms of their scholarships. The non-head count sports, such as baseball, will receive about $1,800.

Head count sports mean the team is restricted in the number of athletes that can be on scholarship. For example, an NCAA DI FBS Football team is allowed 85 scholarships per year and they are only allowed to have 85 athletes on scholarship. They can’t divide that money up to give half scholarships to more athletes.

Clemson’s head-count sports are football, men’s and women’s basketball, women’s tennis and volleyball. All other sports are considered non-head count sports, including baseball.

Other measures passed, but got lost in all the full-coast of attendance legislation, was a discretionary student-athlete assistance fund, allow for student-athletes to borrow against potential future earnings to purchase loss-of-value insurance, a concussion safety protocol and a rule to prevent schools from removing scholarships based on athletic performance.

It was a win-win kind of weekend for the Power 5 Conference schools, who were granted autonomy by the NCAA last fall. It finally gave them the power to take care of their student athletes, who have suffered with other student athletes from schools with smaller athletic budgets to have the same advantages though their school and conferences, in a lot of occasions, refused to upgrade their resources.

“A lot of people only see the final product and there is a lot of work goes into that product that is college athletics,” Andrews said. “To see the amount of work that people were putting in and how hard people were investing themselves into a lot of these topics and what they were willing to do to make sure we, student athletes, have the best experiences the whole time through. Being a current student athlete, it was a great site to see. It made me proud to be a student athlete.”