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The NCAA News - News and FeaturesThe NCAA News -- August 2, 1999
From campus perspective, new staff members anything but green
BY GARY T. BROWN It's a reloading year for the membership services staff at the NCAA national office, not a rebuilding year.
What they have found are people from the very membership the staff serves. In the last 18 months, 17 new administrators have been hired in membership services, and 12 of those hires have been directly from campuses or conference offices. That type of roster composition is not by coincidence, but by design. One thing the national office staff, particularly the membership services staff, has become accustomed to over the past few years is change -- and the membership services staff recognized that changes in its roster would in turn be a change for athletics administrators at colleges and universities who wouldn't be dealing the people they were used to. Kevin C. Lennon, who was promoted to vice-president for membership services last year, said his staff recognized that hiring individuals with campus or conference experience would both calm member institution anxiety and provide the group with the kinds of diversity that might lead to even better service in the future.
Of the most recent hires, five were senior woman administrators and 11 had full-time campus compliance experience. And it's not just Division I experience -- two of the hires have more than 14 years of experience at Division II schools between them. Overall, seven new administrators have at least five years of campus experience, including:
"These hires have provided our staff with people who have varied campus experience and varied educational backgrounds, and they bring a different perspective to our staff because of that diversity," said Robert A. Oliver, director of membership services. "We've been seeking a balance -- not all are compliance coordinators, and not all have law degrees. But once they are oriented to the national office, I guarantee that the membership will benefit from these people." That benefit should be a two-way street -- the new staff already will be familiar with NCAA rules, which will assuage callers from schools; and the first-hand experience with rules applications on campus will shed new light on interpretations reviewed at the national office. O'Grady said the first-hand knowledge gives new staff members a jump on their command of rules and regulations while offering a unique point of view to discussions of interpretations or committee liaison situations, whether the staff member is from a large school or a small school. "If you've been on campus, you've had first-hand experience with a lot of issues," she said. "This should help us get up to speed very quickly because of our experience." Shared information The membership services staff, in addition to seeking hires with campus experience, also has created an infrastructure to take advantage of the remaining veterans, people like Steve Mallonee, longtime membership services staff member who recently was promoted to director of membership services/Division I governance liaison. Mallonee is in charge of providing regular continuing-education sessions to membership services representatives. The sessions serve as a refresher course for the most part, but they also allow new staff to consult senior staff about interpretations that might be particularly challenging.
"Just because we have new peo- On the flip side, some new staff members will provide a resource that perhaps the national office hadn't had in the past. Julie Cromer, hired in April, said that was a pleasant surprise to her when she came on board from Wright State. "What we've gained is diversity, a variety of backgrounds, not only from campuses but in areas of disability services, people with teaching backgrounds, and expertise that I wouldn't have as a compliance coordinator," she said. "For instance, we've got a former English teacher working with the core-course committee in the area of English. Those types of situations should alleviate some membership concerns that might exist about the staff transitioning." Cromer also noted that many former staff members have gone on to positions within the membership and can still be relied upon as a resource. "There were a lot of people who were experts in various fields who have left the national office," she said. "Some of those people are still out there in the membership and will be playing key roles in the process -- they haven't jumped into a vacuum -- they're still serving as leaders, but just in a different capacity." Making the call John Morris, formerly on the staff at Vanderbilt University and now a membership services coordinator, said another reason the campus experience is so valuable is that the staff member will know what it feels like to be on the other end of the phone line. Most of the new hires have had experience calling the national office for interpretations or help in a compliance matter. The trick, Morris said, is to understand the difference between solving a specific circumstance versus a nationally applied rule. He said campus callers tend to want either a yes or a no answer, but that the national office staff would prefer that the institution make that decision after having been explained the principles and the intent behind the rules. He said at the institutional level, administrators are dealing very much with singular issues (how this impacts the institution), while at the national office level, staff is dealing with broad issues (how this impacts all the other institutions across the country). He said it is the staff's job to get the institution to look at the global picture and live within the principles of the rules. "That's where having the campus experience helps because you might have some insight on how an interpretation might impact a situation differently than what the school requesting the interpretation wants," Morris said. "This is a different atmosphere than on campus," Cromer said. "You work with the same rules but in a different way. It's an opportunity to be involved on a more widespread basis." Lennon hopes that involvement will lead to an even greater level of service than the department has been able to provide in the past. He said not only is the goal to beef up the staff from a campus perspective but to launch some new initiatives once the national office relocation is complete. Some of those initiatives include increased telephone hours (to better accommodate schools in the Mountain and Pacific time zones), increased continuing-education sessions designed to assist all administrators with compliance responsibilities in their job descriptions, and increased access and use of the NCAA's Web site for more timely sharing of information. Lennon said that the updates provided after the initial ruling in the Cureton case (which struck down Division I initial-eligibility standards) are examples of using the Internet to provide real-time assistance with issues. "The whole hiring process we've gone through over the past two years isn't just a catch-up initiative," Lennon said. "As good as I think we were in the past, we're aiming to make things even better."
Membership services staff hired since November 1997:
* More than five years of experience at a campus |
After losing several veteran membership services representatives who have left the national office or have chosen not to relocate to Indianapolis, the leadership of the group has had to look to the bench for help.
"We realize that campus and conference administrators may have been accustomed to dealing with the same membership services representative for the last five years or so, and it's understandable that they'd have concerns all of the sudden about who is there to provide counsel," Lennon said. "We've been fortunate to have had a lot of good people in the past who are now working for institutions and conferences, and we've tried to replace them with individuals who are ready to step up and meet the challenge as well as their predecessors did -- and that's why we've sought campus and conference experience. We want to establish that link where peers are communicating with peers, similar to what we had in the past."