Even ahead of Monday’s vote, Loren LaPorte was on the same side of her expecting-to-graduate softball players to get a second chance and was eager to welcome them back to try again for their senior season.

“Oh my gosh, yes,” LaPorte, the James Madison coach, said without hesitation during an interview with the Daily News-Record last week. “I’ll figure it out.”

The softball Dukes listed five seniors – Cambry Arnold, Odicci Alexander, Kate Gordon, Madison Naujokas and Natalie Cutright – on their 2020 roster, and they’ll all be eligible to return next year after the Division I Council voted Monday to approve schools to grant spring-sport athletes an additional season of eligibility since this past campaign was cut short due to COVID-19. Financial aid rules were also adjusted in order for teams to carry more players on scholarship, making room for incoming recruits as well as those seniors who are planning to return.

Gordon was leading the country in hitting and had set the school’s all-time home run record before this season came to an abrupt halt while Alexander was the Colonial Athletic Association Player of the Year last season and in 2018. The softball team has been ranked nationally the past few years and lacrosse won the NCAA crown in 2018.

“They’re some of the best players ever to play in the program,” LaPorte continued. “I wish they could stay forever, and this (program) is theirs. Yeah, I coach, but they’re the ones who put the blood, sweat, and tears into it and I would hate for them to end their careers like this. … But yeah, to have them back would absolutely be amazing.”

Now it’s the responsibility of schools across the country to navigate the financial challenges of providing more scholarships and the burden of all the costs associated with expanded rosters.

JMU athletic director Jeff Bourne said he and his colleagues in the CAA for the past few weeks discussed dealing with those issues, having anticipated the vote would result in favor of giving spring athletes another year of eligibility.

“From the standpoint of the student-athletes, who didn’t have a chance to participate in the spring, it’s certainly the right decision,” Bourne said in a phone interview Tuesday. “And we’re going to do everything we can to help facilitate and make sure they get that opportunity next year.”

Bourne said a very rough estimate of a scholarship bill for those returning senior spring athletes would be close to $250,000 for JMU.

The JMU athletic department expects 12 to 15 total seniors (across eight spring sports), who would’ve exhausted all eligibility this year if not for the coronavirus-shortened season, to return for next year. Those outgoing seniors, who don’t return, likely have already accepted job offers or will graduate and don’t want to make a two-year commitment to graduate school just to play one more season.

“And it’s not just the piece of the scholarship component,” Bourne said, “and making a decision with regard to the scholarship piece, but it’s everything around that as well.

“It’s the operational piece. It’s more equipment and uniforms. It’s more support time needed by academic folks, the sports medicine staff, the strength and conditioning staff, and as that reverberates through your system, it’ll ultimately have an impact on everyone in the department in one way or the other. So it seems on the surface to only be a financial decision from a scholarship perspective, but upon a deeper analysis you find it runs far deeper into the program.”

Bourne said he’s working with spring coaches to confirm which senior athletes will return and which senior athletes won’t, and that once he has a more solid number, he’d be able to come up with more accurate operational and support costs.

On top of additional expenses JMU - like all other Division I programs - will be operating with less revenue after the NCAA announced last week that it’d be distributing $375 million less to its schools after the cancellation of March Madness. If the NCAA tournament was played, the NCAA would’ve paid out approximately $600 million to schools in April, but instead, it’ll be $225 million paid out in June.

“It’s a significant reduction in a line item for us and it does concern me,” Bourne said. “It’s something we can get through in the coming year and we can make some provisions and arrangements to do what we have to do get through it for one year. If it were to exist for more than one year, then it would be a different discussion.”

Beyond the financial scope, Bourne pointed out he still has questions about what the additional year of eligibility means for Title IX.

“Are we still going to be held to our same Title IX numbers that we were before?” he said. “I don’t know that there’s any provision for something like this. And we’re an institution that every year goes through an independent Title IX review of our program, so we as look at numbers coming back, we’ve got to make sure we’re factoring those in. Do we still need to make sure we’re factoring those into the commitments already made for incoming freshmen?

“So it ends up being much more complicated as you start pulling away the layers of decision, but we’re well-versed to make those decisions and we’ll have the data in our hands to make it and we’ll come through this thing doing what’s right and doing what’s right for the student-athletes.”