Encouraged by the scholarship granted him for his athletic ability, th

OFFICIAL SOLUTION

For this question, we need to make sense of the sequence of events. First the player had previously scheduled practice-time then he decided to increase it. Since the first action was completed before the second (he scheduled the original practice-time, then increased it), it makes sense that the first action would be past perfect and the second action would be simple past tense. What it confusing about this sentence is that the first action is placed after the second action. While this original sentence may sound wordy, it is grammatically correct.

In (B), the increase is modifying “scheduled time” rather than “amount of time,” which is the more precise meaning, while (D) has a similar problem in “time devoted to scheduling.” It’s the amount of practice-time that is increasing, not the amount of time spent scheduling. In (C), “scheduled to practicing” is awkward and unclear, and the construction of (E) also suffers from a lack of clarity with the use of the word “number” and the placements of “time scheduled.”

Before you read through the answer choices for any SC featuring underlined past tense and past perfect verbs, try to write down the sequence of events. Get the meaning as clear as possible, and you can more eliminate the tricky answer choices that change the verb tenses to distort the meaning of that sequence!