What is a walk on?

At the end of each year, college coaches are faced with a dilemma. They need a certain amount of roster spots to fill out their team for the following year.  Players have left through graduation, the pursuit of professional or personal dreams, or a host of other reasons. Coaches must determine how to fill out these slots before the following school year. 

This chart shows an example of the roster situations for lacrosse:

Division I schools have an average men’s roster of 51 athletes, compared to women’s 34. There is generally an upper limit that the NCAA sets per sport, but not every school and program has the funds to reach that limit. Many are constrained by budgets to a lower number set by an individual department. These D-I men’s lacrosse teams break their allotted 12.6 full scholarships up between the 51 players on the roster. Scholarships can break all the way down to 1% of the cost of attendance, which can come out to as low as $800. 

Generally, coaches will save a couple of 50-75% scholarships for their blue-chip recruits.  Players they believe will come in as freshmen and have an immediate impact on the team. What’s left of the money is divided between the remaining players in chunks of 1% to roughly 30%. That doesn’t cover the entire 51 slots, which means there is room on the team for players who receive no athletic aid, but will still be a major part of the roster. Those players are referred to as Walk Ons.

Walk ons are not expected to come in and play right away. They are a form of insurance for the more highly recruited athletes, guarding against injury or poor performance. Their biggest role on a team is as an extra body and practice player. During offseason scrimmages, walk ons are crucial to fill out the teams and allow the scholarship players to play full simulated games against college-level competition. 

There are different types of walk ons and they vary from sport to sport. Head count sports (Football, M/W Basketball, Women’s Volleyball, Women’s Gymnastics, Women’s Tennis) give out full scholarships to their maximum number of athletes and still have a few extra roster spots for walk ons. In a sport like basketball, D-I programs are limited to 15 roster spots and 13 scholarships. They will often bring in 17 to 20 players at the beginning of offseason training to compete for those 15 spots. The 13 scholarship players are guaranteed a spot, and it’s up to the 3-6 walk ons to compete for the final 2. College football has its own unique world of walk on rules that will be addressed at the end of this post.

In equivalency sports (sports that have a smaller percentage of students on scholarship and are allowed to split awards up into less than full chunks), the line between the scholarship and walk-on athletes is more blurred.  In D-I baseball, 11.7 scholarships are divided between 27 recipients, but the team carries a 40-man roster. This leaves 13 slots for walk ons. The team often brings in 45-50 players to compete for those 40 slots. The 27 scholarship players are guaranteed a spot, but the rest are up for grabs.

I was a walk on and my own experience can serve as an enlightening one for what to expect as a career walk on.

Freshman Year: 

I arrived at Sonoma State baseball confident that I would be a contributor right away. I was quickly disabused of that notion. I went from a big fish in a small pond to the smallest fish in the ocean. The players I was competing against were 3-4 years older and coming off incredibly successful runs through the Division II playoffs. They were experienced, hungry, and extremely talented. To say I wasn’t even close is a massive understatement. I was redshirted, which meant that I was allowed to be on the team and could come to practice and lift weights with everyone, but I wasn’t allowed to play in games or be in uniform in the dugout. It also saved me a year of eligibility, so my sophomore year would technically count as my freshman season. My role (as a 135 lb.1st baseman) was to show up to practice 2 hours early every single day and stand on first base so our scholarship players could field ground balls and throw to someone across the diamond. I was a glorified field net. 

Sophomore Year:

I battled through a tough fall of practices and scrimmages and achieved my goal of making the 40-man roster. It was a massive accomplishment that was in doubt the whole way. Many of those who had started with me as freshmen were cut and drifted away from the team. Some transferred to other schools or back to junior college programs. Some blended into the general school population, made new friends and followed new pursuits. I was the 40th man on a 40-man roster, which resulted in a grand total of 3 at-bats that year, all in games we were either winning or losing by at least 10. 

Junior Year:

Early on, I started to get the sense that my junior year was to be a repeat of sophomore season, so I made the decision (along with a few other teammates) to work a year of dual enrollment with the local junior college. I continued my classes at Sonoma State while taking a smaller load at College of Marin. It was enough to qualify me to play on the team and led to a great year of junior college experience. I started at first base and was a major contributor to a team that made the JC playoffs. It proved to be an incredibly valuable experience.

Senior Year:

In my senior year, I returned with more experience and confidence. I was 30 pounds heavier than I had been as a freshman. I had close to 100 college at-bats under my belt, and I was able to confidently navigate the politics of the team and school. I easily earned a spot on the 40-man team roster, but didn’t make the more important 27-man travel roster. This meant that I was eligible to play mid-week non-conference home games, but not in the official conference matchups that took place on the weekends. I walked in knowing I wasn’t going to see any action. Even worse, I had to watch my roommates and friends load on a bus every other weekend to go off and play huge matchups against our rivals while I followed the action from home on the internet. I finished the year with a grand total of 12 at bats.

Super-Senior Year:

In my fifth year, for which I was eligible because I red-shirted as a freshman, I was finally able to break through. All of my experience and improvement over four years led me to make the 40-man roster, the 27-man travel team, and eventually crack the starting lineup. I played in every game, led the team in hitting, and earned All-Regional Tournament honors as we battled to 3-outs away from the NCAA Division-II World Series. It was the greatest experience of my life to that point, and made it worth all the pain and suffering I endured over the course of my college career. 

I tell this story to demonstrate the level of love and dedication of their sport someone must have in order to battle through years of failure and come out the other side. I had one of the more rewarding experiences a walk on can have, and it was still full of trials and tribulations that almost led me to quit on several different occasions. I had entered this meat grinder with a cohort of 20 freshmen colleagues. By the time I graduated five years later, there were three of us left. Seventeen had been cut, quit, or transferred without ever seeing the field. The three of us with the grit to see it through finished our careers on a high note.