11-24-2024 1:12am

Alamogordo High Athlete of the Week and Kelan Wall Signs to New Mexico Highlands Baseball

Chris Edwards Editor

Congratulations to Noah Carmody Alamogordo High School Tiger Swimming 11/22/24 Tiger Athlete of the Week. The Toget Athlete of the week is sponsored by Tularosa Basin Telephone Company/Tularosa Communications, Inc. and The Winners' Circle and hosted by 101.9 FM 1230 AM.

Congratulations are also in order to Alamogordo Tiger Baseball’s Kelan Wall on signing his National Letter of Intent to play Baseball at New Mexico Highlands Athletics.

Kelan lettered for 3 years at AHS - he will be studying Sports Science and Kinesiology at NMHU. Congratulations job well done.

Note the National Letter of intent program has changed this year as enhanced but the ceremonial program is similar.

The NCAA Division I Council approved the immediate elimination of the program more commonly known "national letter of intent program", the NCAA announced Wednesday, marking a historic shift to the recruiting landscape. They are replacing it with a enhanced program called a "binding financial aid agreement."

Established in 1964, the NLI program has existed as the formal, binding agreement between prospective athletes and college programs for the past 60 years. The NLI will be replaced by a new financial aid agreement that will provide many of the same core functions as the NLI and will be tied to a contract related to an impending revenue-sharing model across college athletics.

Under the new rules, transfer athletes will be allowed to sign with a new school after they've formally entered the portal. Per the NCAA, once a prospect has signed a written offer of athletic aid, other schools will be "prohibited from recruiting communications."

The Division I Council's move to nix the NLI program comes as the NCAA and college athletics prepare for sweeping change via the impending House settlement, which is set to grant roughly $2.8 billion in damages to former and current college athletes and pave the way for college programs to begin paying their athletes more than $20 million annually as soon as next fall.

A final hearing to approve the settlement is scheduled for April 7, 2025.

The elimination of the NLI program arrives little more than a year after the Collegiate Commissioners Association, which oversees the NLI program, approved policy changes that allowed athletes to pull out of NLI agreements without penalty under certain circumstances. Those changes related to coaching changes and requests for release went into effect for the 2023-24 signing periods for athletes who enrolled during the 2024-25 academic year.