I was looking at the NCAA rules for recruiting and I was confused by one of them and was hoping you could explain it to me. I am a rising senior so it is now acceptable for the coaches to call me, but I was reading the rules and it said that they could only call you once a week. I had a coach call me but I didn’t have my phone so he left a message. Does that count as the one call for the week? (BTW I tried calling back but he didn’t answer so I left a message.)
So I spent awhile Googling this and, unsurprisingly, found very little useful information. I even went through the NCAA D1 manual (a 432 page convoluted monstrosity…) and couldn’t find anything. The one thing I did find though is from an article posted on AthleticScholarships.net back in 2013 about phone call violations reported to the NCAA by Iowa State. Here’s the full article if you want to read it but the part most relevant to your situation says “calls where you do not reach a recruit, which could be a voicemail or someone else picking up the phone, do not count against the numerical limits on phone calls”. Also “The NCAA requires that voicemails, failures to reach the recruit, and dropped calls be supported with “contemporaneous documentation.” That means that in the moment or shortly thereafter, the coach must record why the call should not count.
The thing you’ve gotta realize about the NCAA is that they’ve got coaches on very, very short leashes. I’m pretty sure if they could hand out three year post-season bans simply for not sending them a Christmas card, they would. So while leaving a voicemail might not count against the “one call per week” limit, some coaches might not want to risk it and would instead just wait until the following week to call you again. This is usually why they schedule a specific day/time to talk with you so you can be sure to have your phone nearby. If I understand the rules correctly though, since he couldn’t reach you the first time he called and you called back and left a voicemail, technically he can return that call within the same week since the original call he made doesn’t count. (…hopefully that makes sense.)
My suggestion would be to ask him the next time you talk for clarification on all of this just so that you know what’s permissible and what isn’t. Before coaches can contact prospective student-athletes they’re required by the NCAA to take a recruiting certification exam that tests their knowledge on all the rules, so assuming that he’s done that he would definitely be able to fill you in on how things work. Knowing the rules, even though they don’t necessarily apply to you, could also come in handy should something come up in the future.
You could also call the compliance department (located within the athletic department, for those that didn’t know that…) and ask them for clarification since there’s not really anything explicitly stated online (at least not anywhere that is endorsed by the NCAA) what the protocol is here. Their sole job is to make sure the athletes (and coaches) understand the rules and comply with them so if there’s anyone besides the coach who would know the answer to your question, it’d be these guys.
