Sixty-six.

That’s how many players the Denver men’s lacrosse team has on its roster for the upcoming 2021 season. It’s something that head coach Bill Tierney says is a one-year anomaly caused by the NCAA granting every Division I spring student-athlete a fifth year of eligibility because the 2020 season was shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I know we won’t have 66 guys on our roster a year from now,” the Hall of Famer said.

At the other end of the spectrum is Princeton, which has 13 women’s student-athletes left from its expected roster after 19 chose to take the year off from school, as first reported by US Lacrosse Magazine. The 19 are expected back for the 2021-22 school year.

“That will absolutely impact our numbers next year,” Princeton coach Chris Sailer said. “We’ll have a bigger roster than we’ve ever had. The roster will be bigger for probably two years.”

What exactly a standard Division I roster will look like over the next four years is something coaches have been mulling over since the NCAA announced its blanket waiver in late March. Fifth-year seniors who remained at their respective schools won’t count this year against their program’s scholarship limits, but the scholarship norms of 12.6 for men and 12 for women are expected to return in 2021-22. Coaches expect decision-making puzzles on prioritizing roster composition, tough conversations with players who may want to take an extra year or transfer, and money managing that could be more challenging in the coming years.

“Money management has always been a piece of it if you’re at a school that has scholarships in Division I,” Notre Dame women’s coach Chris Halfpenny said. “We’re professionals. We’ve been balancing a scholarship budget for years and years. You have to make a decision on how big you want your roster and what you can afford. That’s no different than any other year.”

While the NCAA eligibility waiver was widely praised and expected to help student-athletes who didn’t get their full spring seasons, it makes projecting and managing rosters over the next four years more complex. Every player from the 2020 season can consider a fifth year — regardless of their year in school during the 2020 season — which adds another layer to prioritize with the growing transfer numbers and usual volume high school recruits.

“I think you’ll definitely see a spike in those four years of kids taking an extra year rather than your typical redshirt-type kids,” Towson men’s coach Shawn Nadelen said. “People are trying to re-class their commits to try to bump it down the line. People brought kids in, and they’re automatically kind of redshirting them to prepare for things with the added rosters and things like that.”

There are financial ramifications to the extended eligibility particularly if rosters swell. Tierney feels fortunate that Denver, which, in late June, announced cutbacks that included university layoffs and salary reductions in light of a projected a $45 million shortfall for the 2020-21 budget, agreed to a revised budget that allowed eight of last year’s 12 seniors to return for a fifth year.

“It was something that had to be approved by our school administration because we were giving out probably the equal of a scholarship-and-a-half or a scholarship above our norm,” Tierney said. “That had to be specially approved, and we had to wait a long time for that approval. That also made for some anxious moments. They approved us for an amount that allowed us to bring back these guys.”

The Pioneers also brought in transfers Jackson Morrill and Lucas Cotler from Yale and Cole Boland and Logan Deveroux from Loyola. All four are graduate students. The transfers mean that Denver retained in essence the same amount of 12 seniors that would have expected to graduate, plus Denver brought in a freshman class of 15. Denver is preparing to counter retaining players from younger classes in the future by paring down its high school recruits.

“Our 2021 class only has 11 and our 2022 class only has nine,” Tierney said. “We’ll probably get to 10 or 11 instead of 15. So instead of 30 guys, we’ll have 22. That cuts our roster down in a two-year cycle eight more guys.”

Princeton will be in the same boat when its players return next year and a new freshman class joins the roster. The Tigers expect large rosters for a few years and have compensated with a smaller recruiting class from the high school class of 2022. They will prioritize building back up with high school recruits the following year.

“We’re going to have really big graduating classes in the next two years,” Sailer said. “That will balance out the roster, but we can’t go small for too many years in a row; otherwise we won’t have the numbers we need. It’s been a challenge and crunching a lot of numbers to figure out what’s the right approach.”

Princeton does not take transfer players. The Ivy League’s strict regulations that do not allow fifth-year student-athletes already have affected the college landscape. Top Ivy players like Morrill and consensus top transfer Michael Sowers, who moved from Princeton to Duke, headlined last spring’s transfer portal. Ivy League graduates will continue to have the option to transfer elsewhere, and coaches expect booming transfer portal numbers with quality players available nationwide.

“It’s going to be so different for every program, but the challenges are the same — roster management and financials are the two big challenges,” Maryland women’s coach Cathy Reese said. “I’m sure there are ways to figure it all out. It’s just going to depend on the school, the sport sponsored, the requirements and what they choose to do regarding roster management and Title IX.”

After making a target roster size in response to the new eligibility waivers, one of a program’s first considerations is how many of their own seniors could return for a fifth year and how to afford them. The Penn State men’s team has seven of last year’s 13 seniors back.

“You want to invest in your team and your guys first,” Penn State head coach Jeff Tambroni said. “You’re just trying to make sure that when you’re thinking about that extra year, there’s your guys and then guys that might be coming from other programs that might be looking for another year elsewhere. We’ve tried to invest homegrown.”

Tambroni worries about programs overlooking the development of current college players as they chase high-profile transfers or high school recruits. Too many transfers could compromise a program culture.

“We won’t do anything large-term or drastic in terms of ‘saving’ five or six spots,” Tambroni said. “You’re cognizant that one or two kids in a class could be bumped down on your team, which is always a great investment, or maybe come across that transfer wire. I don’t think anything other than that.”

Transfers offer an attractive upgrade if the player is the right fit for a team. A strong fifth-year player or transfer could provide a one-year bump versus the long-term investment in an incoming freshman or developing underclassman already familiar with the team.

“At the end of the line, you want to make sure you’re putting the best product out there that you can,” Tierney said. “But also you have to make sure the kids you recruited aren’t pushed to the backside by kids coming in every year from other places as one-year wonders.”

How much aid a program can give a student-athlete — whether it’s a transfer, a fifth-year or an incoming freshman — will affect some players’ school choices. Any aid that a fifth-year receives would be available the following year.

“I don’t set aside X-amount of dollars to spend on transfers,” Nadelen said. “If you know you’re getting a fifth-year transfer that you might have to invest heavily in, and you’re recruiting a kid that’s going to come in, you can talk to the high school kid and say, ‘We can’t offer you a high amount right now, but we can put together a two-, three- or four-year plan that we’ll commit to providing a minimal amount Year One; but then Years Two, Three and Four, jump it up,’ because you’re losing that fifth-year’s amount and you’ll be able to reinvest it however you want.”

Coaches agree that creating an honest, open environment is paramount for the conversations that they will be having with recruits and players, particularly when it comes to the sticky financial side. Halfpenny has 41 players, up from her preferred 35, after six of last year’s seniors returned, sophomore Emma Schettig transferred from Maryland and the Irish welcomed 12 freshmen.

“Nothing with our six that came back affected that 12 that came in,” Halfpenny said. “Not one thing was affected. Everything that we offered and was signed for has been delivered. Everything that we’ve spoken of, which will include merit-based increases, will be delivered on.”

Halfpenny wouldn’t have taken the six back if they couldn’t pursue the academic and professional paths they wanted, as well as contribute to the lacrosse program this year. While Notre Dame doesn’t pose roster limits like some schools and conferences, Halfpenny limits her numbers to ensure players receive the attention they need to develop. Like her, others worry that adding too many players will limit the experience of their student-athletes.

“Regardless of space or budget, if we’re going to coach a team and philosophically go through what we would deliver to our parents and young men in terms of the relationships we want to build and how we want to develop them, if you start moving your roster that much over, I think it’s challenging to do so,” said Tambroni, whose budget is reduced from the $1,993,671 total operating expenses spent in 2019. “It wouldn’t be our philosophy, regardless of the budget or roster limit. I think that would go against what we’re trying to do here long-term.”

Programs have to sense as early as possible how many players from each senior class they want to retain, if they are saving spots or financial aid for transfers and how many spots they have for incoming freshmen. High school class numbers start getting solidified in the fall for many high school juniors, though a program and student-athlete aren’t bound until they sign a National Letter of Intent as a senior.

“To keep people, you need to be able to balance it within your 12 scholarships that you have,” said Reese, whose Maryland team returned only Brindi Griffin from last year’s senior class. “Because we are signing people and we’re looking at classes far and beyond, that does become more of puzzle to figure out how to do that.”

Bigger rosters force programs to either limit the percentage of their student-athletes receiving any athletic scholarship aid or lower the average amount of aid offered to each student-athlete if a program keeps awarding aid to the same percentage. Said Tierney of the choices: “It’s a budgetary juggling nightmare.”

Key legislation approved in July by the NCAA Division I Council added some roundabout relief. The Council “exempt from counting against team limits need-based financial aid given by the school that meets other specific criteria and other school-given, merit-based awards with no relationship to athletics ability.” The rule went into effect Aug. 1, 2020, and makes it easier for some student-athletes to afford schools with aid that won’t count against a program’s scholarship dollars.

“You have to be prepared for as much as you can be,” Nadelen said. “That’s where you need conversations to understand what our current student-athletes are looking for, if they can even afford a fifth-year option or not. Those things kind of work out along the way, but you want to be prepared for it. You want to have conversations so you don’t paint yourself into a corner.”

Coaches foresee these sorts of conversations and conundrums extending through the next four years as players weigh their options and programs balance their roster numbers and budgets. It could go longer.

“Add another unknown to it — who knows if the NCAA will grant spring sports another year?” Reese said. “They just granted fall and winter sports another year. It wouldn’t surprise me if they granted spring sports another year, which would add a whole other wrench into things, too.”