The NCAA News - News and Features

The NCAA News -- March 15, 1999

Mark your calendars

New legislation brings structure to softball recruiting

BY HEATHER YOST
STAFF WRITER

Jacquie Joseph will not be eating hot dogs for Thanksgiving dinner this year.

No, the Michigan State University softball coach and her colleagues -- instead of sampling concessions cuisine -- will return to the traditional parades and family turkey dinners that the rest of America enjoys annually.

That's because the new softball recruiting calendar, which gained final approval from the Division I Board of Directors in January and will become effective August 1, 1999, lists the holiday season as a quiet time for evaluations and eliminates the need to keep up with the Joneses.

"Softball was in a vicious cycle," said Joseph, who was president of the National Fastpitch Coaches Association (NFCA) during the proposal's legislative process. "We went to tournaments year-round and during holidays because prospects were playing. And players were playing because we were going to the games. It was just inherently wrong. In warm-weather climates, it was year-round, literally, without a break. It was insane."

Joseph and the NFCA constituency joined forces in 1998 in submitting legislation to the Division I Academics/
Eligibility/Compliance Cabinet. The legislation, also known as Proposal No. 98-49, represented the first time a sport or a coaches association had requested recruiting regulation.

"If you are a coach and you think your biggest competitor is going to be at the game, you have to be at the game too," said Lacy Lee Baker, executive director of the NFCA. "No one wants to look like a slacker to a recruit. It was just getting out of hand."

Reasons for implementation

Joseph said the recruiting calendar was proposed primarily for two reasons: To help NFCA members enhance the quality of their lives and help reduce costs in intercollegiate athletics.

"It wasn't that long ago, five or 10 years, that recruiting was limited by our budgets," Joseph said. "We didn't need a recruiting calendar because you did what you could with the money you had. That was it.

"Softball has grown tremendously in prestige and national recognition in recent years, especially with the 1996 Olympics. It has become more and more a nationally recognized sport. We recruit players from all over the country now, and our budgets have grown."

As the budgets grew, Joseph said, so did the insanity.

"When you are a new coach and you are young, you think you are going to get ahead in the game by working hard," she said. "There certainly isn't anything wrong with that attitude, but you start to notice that there is something inherently wrong when coaches don't stay more than five, six, seven years. We are trying to learn from other sports and the coaches that preceded us."

The recruiting calendar declares Thanksgiving Day through January 1 as a quiet period.

Besides the national letter-of-intent weeks in the spring and fall, evaluation periods also are limited during the December NFCA convention and during the Women's College World Series.

Two years of debate

Although the idea for a recruiting calendar seemed to be popular, the notion of proposing restrictive legislation did not come easily for the softball community.

The idea was tied up within the NFCA's membership for more than two years.

"It was debated during the 1996 convention, but it wasn't passed," Baker said. "In 1997, all the conference coaches got together before the convention and proposed different versions of a recruiting calendar. They all had a different number of evaluation days and quiet periods. We debated them and came to an agreement."

The recruiting calendar proposed by the NFCA passed through the NCAA structure without revision.

Like the men's and women's basketball and football recruiting calendars, the softball version designates a maximum number of evaluation days a program can use.

The final proposal of 50 days was a debatable subject among coaches.

"We compromised greatly to come up with 50," Joseph said. "It started out being like 35 or 40, and then we were hearing 70 from some others. The issue was to create time periods, not necessarily use the number of evaluations, as a restriction."

Joseph estimates 50 evaluations may have been nearly what coaches have embarked upon in recent years. Women's basketball programs are currently allowed 40 such days in a year.

"Five years from now, we might come back to this issue and think we need more or less," Joseph said. "We have given ourselves a starting point, and I believe it is pretty fair."

One evaluation day in softball will be counted for each coach per day. For example, if a head coach and an assistant coach attend together, two evaluation periods will have been used on the same day.

This system is different than football, where a day counts as only one evaluation regardless of the number of coaches on the road during the same day.

Another quirk of the newly established recruiting calendar exempts high-school competition from counting against evaluation periods.

Since softball recruiting is primarily based on regional play, the NFCA wanted to ensure that recruiting at high-school competition would not be eliminated if the proposal passed.

The exemption allows coaches to attend and support state tournaments without taking a hit in the number of evaluation days available during the year.

"If we didn't exempt high-school games, coaches more than likely wouldn't go," Baker said. "Why would they go when they could choose to go to a larger tournament and see more prospects? It just makes sense."