In American and Canadian college athletics, a walk-on is someone who becomes part of a college team without being recruited or awarded an athletic scholarship. Walk-on players are generally viewed as weaker less-significant players and may not even be placed on an official depth chart or traveling team, while the scholarship players are a team's main players. However, a walk-on player occasionally becomes a noted member of the team.

General parameters

Purpose

The reasons athletes choose to pursue the path of a walk-on include:

In collegiate sports

Many schools that do not provide athletic scholarships still recruit student athletes, and these students can get admitted to a school with academic records that are below average for that school. The Ivy League, for example, does not permit athletic scholarships, but each school has a limited number of athletes it can recruit for each sport. Additionally, all prospective athletes are required to meet a minimum score on what the league calls the Academic Index (AI), a metric based largely on high school grade-point averages and SAT or ACT scores. The goal of the AI is to ensure that students who receive athletic admissions slots fall within one standard deviation of the credentials of the student body as a whole. Division III athletes cannot receive athletic scholarships, but frequently get an easier ride through admissions. Even though these students do not receive athletic scholarships and are not required to play to remain in school, they are not walk-ons, because they were recruited. Instead of being awarded an athletic scholarship, they were granted an athletic admissions slot to a school to which they ordinarily would not have been likely to have gained admission.