The NCAA News - News and Features

May 25, 1998

Division I works on making Convention an effective forum

BY GARY T. BROWN
STAFF WRITER

Division I is looking at how to maintain a meaningful presence at the annual NCAA Convention now that restructuring has negated the need to assemble in a traditional voting forum.

Results from a recent survey could provide a first step toward determining Division I's future involvement at the Association's largest annual gathering.

The survey was distributed to all Division I chief executive officers, faculty athletics representatives, directors of athletics, senior woman administrators, compliance coordinators and conference commissioners. Attendance records indicate that slightly more than 91 percent of all Division I member institutions were represented at the 1998 Convention, compared with 97 percent in 1997.

And though it makes sense that the restructured legislative process would trigger a natural decline in the number of Division I delegates, what has some people within the Division I structure concerned is a sense that the desire to congregate at all seems to be down as well.

"It's too early to draw many conclusions," said Robert A. Bowlsby, athletics director at the University of Iowa and chair of the Division I Management Council. "We're waiting to receive feedback from conferences and we're also looking at whether the order of meetings is what it should be. There are a lot of unknowns as to whether we can legitimately expect to get presidents to the Convention in future years."

Nearly 45 percent of those responding had not decided whether to attend the 1999 Convention in San Antonio. And 70 percent of Division I CEOs indicated either they would not attend or had not decided.

Division I respondents also were not enthusiastic about conducting many Association-wide sessions at the Convention. Only 31 percent said they would attend an Associa-tion-wide forum or discussion session involving more than 100 delegates. Just 20 percent said they would attend an Association-wide breakout session with fewer than 50 delegates.

The survey did indicate fairly strong support from athletics directors and other administrators for conference meetings at the Convention, but only 20 percent of the com-missioners saw the need to meet at the Convention site.

"Based on the survey, it's apparent that commissioners were more or less unimpressed with this year's Convention," Bowlsby said. "And yet there may be some timing or transition issues at work here, too. The Convention now is just different enough from what we've had before that it's going to take a while for people to settle in."

New structure success

Bowlsby also said that the lack of presidential attendance may indicate that they believe the new structure is doing what it was designed to do.

"I think the Division I Board of Directors is pleased that the Association is operating under presidential control," he said. "And I sense that the Management Council is settling in very well to the task at hand.

"We need to make sure, though, that the conduits are open for people to have input and to understand what's going on in the governance system. There still are some people out there who feel disenfranchised because they weren't allowed to get on the Convention floor and be able to influence the way votes were cast."

Stephen R. Morgan, chief of staff for Division I, said that unless there is an override vote or a constitutional amendment that commands the attention of all three divisions, future Conventions can't be expected to look like past Conventions.

"It's only the comparison to the old that makes Division I's participation appear to have changed dramatically because the Divisions II and III schools come with one or two representatives all the time anyway. If Division I falls back to that level, then what we're seeing is a high percentage of our membership represented at our Convention that adds up to 1,000 or 1,200 delegates instead of 2,700. It's really an apples and oranges situation to compare the numbers of our current Convention to those when we had two full days of voting. It just isn't very appropriate."

Staff involvement

Morgan also addressed the sentiment expressed by some that the national office staff is the primary promoter of the Convention, which is required by the NCAA Constitution.

He said that the Management Council has charged the Strategic Planning Cabinet with developing plans for Division I participation at the Convention in order to increase the membership's role in planning the event and to help assuage the notion that the Convention may be staff-driven.

"The staff has felt all along that it was important to find the right body in the new structure in Division I to assist in planning the Convention," Morgan said. "The general position of the staff is that we're not going to be too concerned with the overall numbers in Division I. There might be some concern if people stopped coming altogether, but the numbers this year indicated that better than 90 percent of Division I was represented. What we didn't have was the broad delegations that those schools used to bring. If we've got 300 schools represented by 500 people as opposed to 300 schools represented by 1,500 to 1,800 people, is that an issue? I'm not sure it is."

Bowlsby said he didn't think anyone would presume there was anything special about the program at this year's Convention, but that it might be presumptuous to scrap the old system altogether.

"We just went down the path and tried to do what we could," he said of the 1998 event. "But our business needs something like our annual Convention to create and maintain the collegiality that has been a hallmark of such get-togethers in the past. And I don't have any sense that this is being largely driven by staff--I think it's being largely driven by tradition.

"Staff and others involved in leadership positions within the new structure are trying to retain the best elements of past Conventions and fine-tune future Conventions with new ideas to make them as functional as they can be. If we do that and find out that we don't need a convention, then that same group will go to the membership and say so. On the other hand, we may come across a model that really works and is just what the membership needs. Only time will tell if we really need a convention."