Someone mentions Gift going to Harvard. Never heard that before. I know I am in the minority here, but I've felt that Gift will suprise people for us next year, that he'll be a bigger contributor than many think. I don't want to see him transfer. Seems like no one ever talks about him here, apart from saying he'll ride the bench. I always felt he never was able to get into a groove, always fearing foul trouble, having to play tentatively. I think it will be a shame if he goes.
Does Gift to Harvard for next season make ANY sense? The talk of his agreeing to the redshirt this year as a senior is that it gives him an extra year on full athletic scholarship - a Post Grad year paid for. Ivy league schools don't HAVE athletic scholarships.
Harvard meets 100% of its students needs in financial aid. They calculate what they think your parents (or the student) can afford, and they pick up the rest of the tab.
And yes, it makes perfect sense if coach told him last summer; there's not a lot of playing time here for you, you can transfer now and have to sit out a year, or stay here as a redshirt, graduate, and you can transfer without penalty and you'll have a degree.
No, they don't. From a Crimson article on recruit Noah Allen, who'll be a freshman at UCLA next year
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/10/3/noah-allen-decommits-100212/ :
Harvard men’s basketball recruit Noah Allen rescinded his verbal commitment to the Crimson and reopened his recruitment on Monday, citing financial aid concerns.
“My family can’t afford 60 grand a year, and that’s what the financial aid people told us it would cost,” Allen said. “It broke my heart. I really wanted to go to Harvard, but the numbers didn’t add up.”
Allen, ranked as the 29th best small forward in this year’s senior class by ESPN, fell in love with Harvard early on in the recruiting process.
“It wasn’t even really about basketball,” Allen said. “The prestige, that’s why I committed.”
The current high school senior committed in late July, following a visit to campus.
“I got there and I fell in love with it,” Allen said. “It wasn’t what I expected, but I knew it was where I wanted to go.”
But Allen's quest to attend Harvard was thwarted at roughly the same time by the financial aid office’s projected contribution package.
“One reason I committed [in July] was that [the financial aid office] said it would cost five or ten percent of my family’s income,” Allen said. “And then they came back [asking for] the whole thing and it caught [my family] off guard a little bit. We just can’t do that. My parents can’t go into debt.”
At that point, Allen tried everything he could to get the office to reconsider their estimate, but to no avail.
“They thought they could get [the price] down, but it just didn’t happen,” Allen said. “We tried everything, but they said, ‘No, we can’t give you anything.’”
Allen, who said he has a 3.9 GPA at Palma School in Salinas, Calif., was confident that he would meet the academic requirements needed to get admitted to Harvard.
But due to financial concerns, he and his family finally concluded Monday that his dream wasn’t going to come true. That night, Allen tweeted, “Doing what I just did sucks.”
This isn’t the first time that the Crimson has lost a prized recruit due to issues of financial aid, as the Ivy League does not allow athletic scholarships. In 2009, Rod Odom Jr., a top 100 prospect in the class of 2012, chose to enroll at Arizona rather than Harvard. He later recommitted to Vanderbilt.
“The thing that prevented Harvard from being in the last two was when we got the financial aid indication, which—compared to a full scholarship—couldn’t be a consideration for us,” Rod Odom Sr. told The Crimson in March.