Just because an athlete is committed to playing at the collegiate level, doesn’t mean that they are guaranteed a spot on the signing panel at Granite Bay High School.  

  Zach Wong, a senior, committed to play soccer at the University of California San Diego the summer before his senior year.  

  “To put it simply, nothing happened for me,” said Wong.

  He did not receive any athletic money at UCSD, but was offered a spot on the team.

  “It turns out I was getting an institutional letter of intent, meaning it was not binding, even though I committed before senior year,” Wong said.

   Wong was not signing a National Letter of Intent (NLI), so he was unable to participate in this event.  

  “A national letter of intent is about signing an athletic scholarship, in which a student receives money from a school to participate in a college program on their campus,” said athletic director Tim Healy.

  Athletes who were not signing a NLI, or walk-ons, were not permitted to sign at GBHS.

  “A walk on can be anyone from a kid that was invited to try out for a team, to a preferred spot on a team, to an actual spot on the team to which you are invited to spring training and other activities like all of the scholarship athletes,”  Healy said.

  Clare Murphy, a preferred walk-on at California Polytechnic University for women’s soccer, found out about her inability to participate from her high school soccer coach.

 “Before signing day, my high school coach, Mark Broers, texted me to ask if I was participating in signing day,” Murphy said, “he said that they were not honoring preferred walk-ons for signing day.”

  Murphy originally had a scholarship at the University of San Francisco, but decided to play soccer at Cal Poly instead.  

  “I wouldn’t change my decision to drop my scholarship, even though I didn’t get to sign,” Murphy said.