Dominic Sylvester, an offensive lineman for the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is miserly when it comes to his pair of dress shoes.

They are wingtips, size 15, and he wears them to church, comes back to his dorm room and takes them off right away to preserve them. They are starting to get that old-shoe flex, and he can feel the ground more and more on the bottoms of his feet, just like with his cheap pair of tennis shoes.

“A good pair of shoes for me, which are hard to find because of my size, can cost $150,” said Sylvester, an accounting major, who is 6 feet 4, 315 pounds. “You make them last and last. I don’t have a lot of extra money to buy new ones. I’ve burned the rubber out. They don’t have holes in them, but they are getting there.”

Sylvester is a Division I football player whose tuition, books, dorm room and meal plan are paid for with his athletic scholarship, which is worth between $26,000 and $28,000. But it is the miscellaneous expenses — like new shoes — that have put him and other players in the center of the debate going on at the NCAA Convention this week in San Diego.

There is a gap between what the athletic scholarship provides and what the actual cost of attendance at college usually demands. At UAB, he said, that gap is about $3,000.

Many Division I athletic directors and football and basketball coaches want to add a stipend of several thousand dollars to an athletic scholarship to make up the difference. But others do not want to provide the money because they insist their departments cannot handle the extra expense.

The public has termed the issue “pay for play,” and many believe it would lead to the ruination of the amateur sports model. The athletes roll their eyes in dismay at the misperception.

“Absolutely, I’m all for it. We could use the money,” Sylvester said. “Being from out of state, I had about $1,100 in travel expenses last year. Even getting the Pell Grant, there is not a lot of money left over, say, if you need a new pair of shoes, or a suit for special occasions, or even to go bowling.”

The Pell is a need-based grant, provided by the federal government. Sylvester receives $2,250 a semester in Pell Grant funds.

Like many Division I football and basketball players, Sylvester doesn’t rely much on help from his folks. His dad is unemployed with a medical disability, and his mother works for the county social services office in Horseheads, N.Y. Their income is about $50,000 a year.

“I try not to ask for money from home,” Sylvester said.