AAA Pathway is piloting a partnership with Honest Game, a Chicago-based organization that seeks to provide real-time and realistic insight into college athletic eligibility rules for NCAA and NAIA scholarships. Honest Game creates current academic reports, which can assess the academic performance of individual student athletes to present day (including grades, courses taken and ACT/SAT Test scores), and measure it against the NCAA and NAIA standards. These reports then share information and recommendations on how a student can improve their eligibility. This straightforward and unemotional tool allows students & their support systems to see a clear roadway to success, if playing collegiate sports on scholarship is their goal.
The current process of acquiring these academic reports and checking on the academic status of student athletes requires intensive time and labor from the AAA Pathway coaches. When AAA coaches want to run an academic report for a specific student athlete, they would need to contact the AAA District Pathway Advisor, Stephanie Price, who would then run a report, using the student’s transcript. The coaches need to do this every grading period, helping to ensure that the student athletes stay on the right path.
Honest Game helps eliminate this process, allowing the coaches to access the academic reports using their interactive software. In addition, the academic reports tracked by Honest Game are updated at the end of each grading period automatically. This means that AAA coaches no longer need to manually update the academic reports for each student athlete themselves.
This new program will allow AAA Pathway coaches more time to spend with students in mentoring conversations and assisting in goal planning, and less time compiling and assessing data at a computer. Further, the reports provided by Honest Game provide steps and ideas for improvement based on a calculated algorithm, helping AAA coaches identify which areas each student athlete can focus on to improve their academic standing.
ABC is most excited about the equity this program provides, as the system generates reports for ALL CPS student-athletes, instead of only those requested by AAA coaches. These reports are accessible at any time, providing any student-athlete the chance to explore the option of college athletics. We believe this will increase the eligibility rate of student athletes at CPS, allowing more to advance their careers in college athletics.
ABC and Cincinnati Public Schools are excited to begin this pilot program at four CPS high schools for the rest of the current school year. The goal is to the implement this new program with Honest Game at all 14 high schools next year, for the 2021-22 school year and beyond.
To learn more about AAA pathway, click here: AAA Pathway.
