Walk-on (sports)

College team member without a scholarship

In American and Canadian college athletics, a walk on is someone who becomes part of a college team without being recruited or awarded an athletic scholarship. Walk on players are generally viewed as weaker less significant players and may not even be placed on an official depth chart or traveling team, while the scholarship players are a team's main players. However, a walk on player occasionally becomes a noted member of the team.

Because of scholarship limits instituted by the NCAA, many football teams do not offer scholarships to their punters, long snappers and kickers until they have become established producers. Sometimes injury or outside issues can ravage the depth chart of a particular position, resulting in the elevation of a walk on to a featured player. In other situations, a walk on may so impress the coaching staff with their play on the scout team and in practice that they are rewarded with a scholarship and made a part of the regular depth chart. Often, it is the players who achieve success in this manner that are the inspiration for future walk ons. One significant college football national award, the Burlsworth Trophy named for the eventual All American former walk on offensive lineman at the University of Arkansas, Brandon Burlsworth has been awarded since 2010 to the most outstanding player in the top level Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) who began his college career as a walk on. The only two time recipient of the Burlsworth Trophy, Baker Mayfield (2015 and 2016), won the 2017 Heisman Trophy. He began his college career as a walk on at Texas Tech University before transferring to the University of Oklahoma, where he received all of the aforementioned awards. Also, there are times where a walk on will be a dependable member of the team's practice and scout teams for several years. If a team has an extra scholarship, it may award it to the player as a token of appreciation for their hard work and devotion to the team, although the player may never actually play in a game. Finally, in rare cases, an established scholarship player may become a walk on in order to open up their scholarship for another player. Three such cases in men's college basketball have received notoriety in recent years:
In 2011–12, three Louisville scholarship players, most notably Kyle Kuric and Chris Smith, became walk ons to bring the Cardinals' scholarship totals down to the NCAA limit of 13. In 2013–14, Creighton's Doug McDermott (the son of Creighton's head coach) became a walk on after a teammate was granted a rare sixth year of eligibility by the NCAA, putting the Bluejays over the 13 scholarship limit. In 2014–15, Xavier starting center Matt Stainbrook enrolled in the school's MBA program and gave up his scholarship for his younger brother Tim, who had been a walk on at Xavier the year before, in order to save their family a five figure amount in school expenses. This led him to become a driver for the on demand car service Uber, which gained him significant notoriety during that season.

Many schools that do not provide athletic scholarships still recruit student athletes, and these students can get admitted to a school with academic records that are below average for that school. The Ivy League, for example, does not permit athletic scholarships, but each school has a limited number of athletes it can recruit for each sport. Additionally, all prospective athletes are required to meet a minimum score on what the league calls the Academic Index (AI), a metric based largely on high school grade point averages and SAT or ACT scores. The goal of the AI is to ensure that students who receive athletic admissions slots fall within one standard deviation of the credentials of the student body as a whole. Division III athletes cannot receive athletic scholarships, but frequently get an easier ride through admissions. Even though these students do not receive athletic scholarships and are not required to play to remain in school, they are not walk ons, because they were recruited. Instead of being awarded an athletic scholarship, they were granted an athletic admissions slot to a school to which they ordinarily would not have been likely to have gained admission.