Reclassification (education)

For young athletes, graduating a year earlier frees them to start their college sports career, with the hope of playing professionally sooner.

[4] The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) requires incoming students to have taken 16 core courses, with 10 completed by their seventh semester in high school.

[8] In 2007, in response to diploma mills, the NCAA required that 15 of those 16 courses be completed in the first four years of high school.

[4] In his 2008 bestseller Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell examines relative age effect and the success of older kids in youth hockey.

[4] While the practice of redshirting in kindergarten has existed for decades, holding back kids without any evident academic or social limitations is more contentious.

Louisiana public schools do not allow a student to repeat sixth, seventh or eighth grade for athletic reasons.

[21] In basketball, Mike Gminski was a pioneer for graduating high school early to enroll at Duke University in 1976.

[2][8] Players who reclassified early that entered the NBA after one year of playing college ball include Andre Drummond, Andrew Wiggins, Noah Vonleh, Marvin Bagley, Nerlens Noel, Karl-Anthony Towns and Jamal Murray, who were all selected within the first 10 picks of the NBA draft.

[19] Some athletes, such as basketball players Thon Maker and Anfernee Simons, reclassify early but bypass college, instead doing a postgraduate year before entering the NBA draft.

[2][8] In other cases, the athlete moving earlier came from an international school model, typically Canada, with a different timing than the U.S.

[2] If a college coach has a conflict with too many recruits for a given year, having a player reclassify and arrive earlier could resolve the issue.

[27] Players essentially got an early exposure to college courses, while also facing a higher level of athletic competition and access to training, without the year counting against them.