The new scheduling rules for NCAA Division III were approved by the Division III Management Council in April 2023. These rules, aimed at improving the balance between athletics and academics for student-athletes, were set to start with the 2024-2025 academic year. To better support the full athletic department, we designed and developed a solution that centralizes management by Athletic Directors and Compliance Officers and participation entry by coaches.

The documentation below explains how Scheduling Rules are applied according to the guidelines provided by the NCAA Academic and Membership Affairs department for various sports and seasons. For more detailed information about seasons and compliance checks, please access the information at these links:

Audience: Athletic Directors and Compliance Officers

Location: ARI Department Manager

Before coaches can enter participation days for their teams, some set-up must be completed and functionality turned on for teams. This functionality is available in Department Manager by selecting Settings > Scheduling Rules. Some of the settings are academic year-specific, so they must be reviewed and managed before the start of each academic year.

For each sport, ARI calculates the in-season and out-of-season dates (when applicable). Some of those dates are calculated based on your institution specific dates.

Note: If you do not yet have Department Manager access, send us a chat message or email support@arirecruiting.com to request access.

Note: ARI will automatically roll over to the new academic year in July, so the default should be the current academic year. However, you can change the academic year with the dropdown.

These dates must be supplied so that in-season and out-of-season periods are calculated correctly. Other dates such as NCAA selections, 15-week dates, and standard start dates for sports like basketball and wrestling are managed and maintained by ARI.

Because coaches can manage more than one sport in a single ARI account (e.g. Men's and Women's Cross Country/Track & Field), it is important to review and select the correct sports for which participation needs to be logged. We have split sports by men and women to allow for more granular participation logging.

The system pre-aligns the compliance sport with a season. In most instances, this does not need to be changed. However, you can change the season if appropriate. Changing the season will impact the rules that are applied during compliance checks.

If the season needs to be changed, select the correct season from the drop-down.

Teams can be activated in bulk using the Activate All button or individually using the toggle next to the team.

Audience: Coaches

Location: ARI Team Accounts

We have tried to make the management and entry for coaches as simple and streamlined as possible. Once Scheduling Rules has been turned on, a new icon is available in the left-hand menu of each team's account between Notes and Settings.

The scheduling rules screen can be broken into four sections:

A. Sport Header

B. Entry Block

C. Calendar

D. Compliance Check

Some ARI teams manage more than one sport in a single ARI account (e.g. Cross Country and Track & Field or Men’s and Women’s Golf). This will mean that seasons or participation dates may be different, thus requiring different calendars and compliance calculations. Don’t worry, we have given you an easy way to copy participation from one sport to another if they are the same or similar. If your team has more than one sport, you can navigate between the sports using the tabs in the sport header.

1. Academic Year. Entry defaults to the current academic year. You can change the year of entry through this drop-down.

2. Week Start Day. Choose which day of the week you would like the system to begin counting weekly participation both in-season and out-of-season.
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Example: Start day is set to Tuesday. The system counts the number of participations from Tuesday until the Monday of the next week.

3. Permissible Start Date. For fall and period seasons, this date must be entered by you.

4. Compliance Season. Outlines your compliance season including the in-season and out-of-season (if applicable) dates based on the academic dates provided by your AD, NCAA Selection dates, and the Permissible Start Date.
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Once all the values are populated, the In-Season and Out-of-Season dates are set.
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As you click on dates of participation, the in-season and out-of-season days increment. Select Check to have ARI validate your participation days against the rules outlined for your sport and season. Items that are checked:

If you have items out of compliance, you can fix them and re-run the check.

Audience: Athletic Directors and Compliance Officers

Location: ARI Department Manager

At any time, you can access a full department view of scheduling rules compliance in Department Manager > Scheduling Rules. Each team is listed with the corresponding compliance sports.

Click on a sport to see a summary and any compliance issues.

You can also download a report of all teams by clicking on the download icon in the upper, right-hand corner.

You can choose to manage and activate these sports if you would like. By choosing the Other season, the only compliance item verified is the number of participation days in a given week. In-season and out-of-season dates cannot be calculated.

That is completely up to your department. If you activate scheduling rules with the Other season, the only compliance item verified is the number of participation days in a given week.

Please send up a chat message or email support@arirecruiting.com, and our team will do a review and get back with you.