Guest editorial -- Limit athletes' hours, not their potential
By Dallas Curtis
Are student-athletes so caught up with the do-what-it-takes-to-win attitude that we succumb to altering time sheets, having "voluntary/mandatory" meetings or even participating in the occasional "extra" practice? Surely not. There's no way that student-athletes would do that sort of thing.
So who does take advantage of the so-called 20-hour rule? Surely not the coaches. After all, their jobs are at stake if they violate the rules. They have families to provide for and bills to pay. However, their jobs also are on the line if they don't win.
Maybe it is the thousands of rules that the NCAA has established that have made it practically impossible for the average Joe to understand what he/she can and cannot do. No, that's not it. We have compliance officers for that.
So many factors play into the failure of the 20-hour rule. They are factors that should be labeled as excuses, excuses to win.
That is what everyone is after, right? I have heard of student-athletes putting in close to 40 hours a week in preparation for a contest (although an extreme case, it demonstrates what can happen if regulations are not enforced).
Can you overprepare yourself? I believe it is impossible for a student-athlete to go to school, participate 20 hours per week in athletics, study adequately, maintain a part-time job and who knows what else -- yet it is done all the time. The human body is designed to handle only so much. After that, you overload physically and emotionally.
We are blessed with a competitive drive that promotes doing everything within our power to be victorious. From coaches to the team captain to a student-athlete looking for more playing time, rules always will be tested in order to win. The 20-hour rule is no exception.
My background is solely in football, but I believe that if a rule is abused in one sport, then it is probably abused in others. Other football players tell me that they violate 20-hour rule, but most say that they don't know for sure but think they probably do.
Here's the problem: The student-athletes
are not sure because they do not know what counts against the 20 hours. For instance, there may be a team meeting held by the captains in which roll is taken. Absences are later checked by a coach, who in return punishes the ones who miss.
Many student-athletes believe that this type of event would not be recorded against the 20-hour limit, but it undoubtedly should be. Any time punishment is the result of being absent or even late, it should be documented just as a recorded practice or film session.
In fact, student-athletes are not aware of what is right and what is wrong when it comes to the rules. This is one reason campus student-athlete advisory committees were set up. They provide knowledge and background information concerning topics such as the 20-hour rule.
Can they provide enough? I believe that it is going to take complete cohesiveness between administration, coaches and student-athletes to find a solution to this problem, if a solution is in fact possible.
Student-athletes are definitely uneducated about rules and regulations in college athletics. I strongly suggest creating ways to improve student-athlete awareness of abused regulations. Every year, we attend drug seminars or watch anti-gambling videos. How difficult would it be to have all incoming student-athletes take a "quiz" over the restrictions that govern their way of life and explain those rules to them?
Sport is a powerful, powerful thing and for many, it is the most important thing in their lives. So don't take away what makes it special.
Dallas Curtis is a football player at Northeastern State University and a member of the Division II Student-Athlete Advisory Committee.
Letter to the Editor -- Imbalance is a football numbers game
By William Brill
In the November 8 edition of The NCAA News, there was a guest editorial by Stanford University athletics director Ted Leland (discussing the latest NCAA Gender-Equity Report) and an article by Mike Wenzl, faculty athletics representative at California Polytechnic State University (discussing coaches' salaries and scholarship reductions in football). I believe there are reasonable explanations for the issues they discussed.
Leland oversees the nation's most successful athletics program. Stanford has been the dominant university in the annual Sears Directors' Cup competition, usually winning by a wide margin. Stanford has finished first every year except the first, 1993, when the championship went to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
So there is no question that Leland knows how to operate a successful program, and the Cardinal is particularly strong in female sports.
Because of the impact of Title IX, women's sports have grown rapidly, especially in the last few years of this decade. There is no reason to believe the expansion will not continue.
However, one area that troubles Leland is disproportionate salaries for assistant coaches. He indicates that men's assistant coaches receive 73 percent and women's assistant coaches 27 percent of the resources at Division I.
The why of that is obvious, and not necessarily insidious. Football. There are nine assistant coaches in Division I football, and their salaries are rising rapidly, as are the salaries of head coaches of many of the major powers.
Only a couple of years ago, a $1 million package for a football coach was unheard of anywhere. Now the University of Florida's Steve Spurrier makes $2 million, and there are a growing number of those whose compensation is in seven figures.
Trickle down
That has worked its way down to assistant coaches. At some schools, the nine football assistants collectively make as much as $1 million, and the salaries in the competitive market continue to mushroom. The offensive coordinator at Georgia Tech makes $200,000. For most of the year, the Yellow Jackets have led the nation in scoring and total offense. I'm sure the school considers the salary a bargain.
The last average figure that I heard for Division I football assistants was $65,000. I'm certain it is higher now, but even at that number, the total is $585,000 annually.
Obviously, no women's sport has nine assistant coaches, or even close to it. Assistants in all other sports except men's and women's basketball don't approach the level of football. Thus, it's easy to understand why a 73-27 percentage is possible, even if a school is paying top dollar to all its coaches.
There are only a handful of head coaches at any level, either gender, whose salaries are comparable to football assistants. I would be surprised if the salaries weren't very close for men and women in all other sports.
Football is indeed a numbers game, which brings us to Wenzl's suggestion that football should reduce the number of scholarships in Division I-A from 85 to 60.
It won't happen, because it would immediately produce a significant reduction in the number of scholarships to African-American athletes, which is something that nobody wants.
There are only three sports that have a large number of black participants -- football, men's and women's basketball, and men's and women's track and cross country. Football is by far the largest.
In the 1998-99 school year, there were 8,898 scholarship football players in Division I-A. Of that total, 50.7 percent, 4,513, were black, and the percentage has been growing annually.
If Division I-A would reduce the number of grants in football from 85 to 60, it would effectively reduce the number of black athletes by more than 1,400. I simply can't see any way this ever would be permitted to occur.
William Brill is the retired sports editor of the Roanoke (Virginia) Times.
Comment -- Human values are found in the practice of sport
BY MIKE MULLAN
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE
BY MIKE MULLAN
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE
Dan Bridges, in "Prop 2-53 Gets Back to Traditional Values" (The NCAA News, November 22, 1999), is concerned about the excesses of intercollegiate athletics in the off-season -- in NCAA terms, the "nontraditional" season. On the surface, few would disagree with this value position.
This is part of the ongoing Presidents Council reform, an administrative effort to reclaim control of athletics, to achieve balance and reinsert values and education into sport. Balance is the key concept in intercollegiate athletics; if we organize sports programs that understimulate the student-athlete, then there is little learned or gained from the effort. If we overstimulate the student with an excessive training program, then the personality shuts down, and once again sport fails as a heuristic device. Presumably, Prop 2-53 is concerned with the later contingency.
However, this piece of NCAA legislation is itself excessive and potentially punitive. To banish all competition in the nontraditional season, leaving teams to languish in a series of practice sessions, may clean out the gyms, fields and courts, but it also may undermine the link to principled action that is the basis of amateur, educative sport. I wonder if there are more creative and humane ways than the Prop 2-53 ban on off-season competition to achieve balance in our college sport programs.
We have organized sports in American colleges and institutions because of the connection to human values. Sport is assumed to teach lessons about individual striving and group sacrifices, about discipline and morality, and these messages are covertly imbedded in the practice of preparing and the playing of our Western games. Such has been the canon of belief since the late 1800s leading up to our current, late-modern mix of philosophical musings about the nature of amateur sport, embodied in the Division III philosophy.
Tennis avoids excess
There are excesses in sport. We see them and understand them every day and criticize them. Dan Bridges has described them as a regime of 20 to 25 hours of intercollegiate sport per week. A weekly sports program that operates at that level of raw time commitment, in season or out, is prima facie evidence for the elimination of that sport. He identifies baseball and softball, currently permitted 45 contests during the course of an academic year, as institutionalized excess. However, most sport programs at the Division III level do not require this level of commitment. Surely a nontraditional program can be intelligently managed without overloading and numbing our students.
Tennis is a successful example of a simple program of a limited off-season practice and competition in the fall combined with a major spring season of match play. Typically, most Division III men's and women's tennis teams across the country gather in the fall to take advantage of the fine tennis weather for practice. The culminating event is the fall Intercollegiate Tennis Association Tournament (ITA) held on either the final weekend in September or the first weekend in October. The ITA is normally the only event of outside competition for most Division III schools. The ITA event is a goal that frames practice, motivates a limited program of conditioning and sustains interest. The nontraditional segment in tennis is over in four to five weeks, leaving tennis student-athletes on their own for the remaining nine to 10 weeks left in the fall semester.
Prop 2-53, even with the tennis and golf exception, would eliminate fall competition in tennis and the highly valued and successful ITA tournament. As Dan Bridges explains, tennis would receive an exemption if an institution plays more than 50 percent of the 20 allowable dates of tennis competition in the nontraditional season and ends that season with their conference championships. Very few institutions would be able to take advantage of this exemption.
While Prop 2-53 seems like the clean answer to a messy problem, it works merely at the legislative and bureaucratic level. Its totality and lack of differentiation among sports will do severe damage to responsible and restrained off-season sport programs, like tennis.
Unanticipated consequences
When we submit contemporary sport to systematic analysis and observation, we find that playing sport protects the student, increases the chances of graduation and improves intellectual work. We also know that athletes perform better academically in their competitive season than completely out of season. It seems that tapping into the disciplinary code, whether one encounters it on the court or in the classroom or in the solitary labors of writing a thesis, prompts a response that is congruent with the production and achievement goals of our society.
There are hidden costs to a lengthy schedule of sport and these come, as Dan Bridges explains, in the form of expanded hours for the athletic training room, increased expenditures for athletics gear and the further taxing of administrative support necessary. The "nontraditional" games also could tax the existing physical plant devoted to athletics. This can be a thorny institutional problem that may be overcome with rational scheduling and, if necessary, individual institutional limits on sport.
As we approach sport in the late modern period, we find that it is a much more reflexive institution in which traditional methods do not work. Legislative action in the form of Prop
2-53 belongs to a simpler, more traditional world in which rules were simply followed. Bans and punitive rules also tend to have unanticipated consequences and tend to create pockets of opposition.
The bureaucratic mind loves regulation, something tangible to tuck into files, but intercollegiate athletics is not that neat; in fact, it's much more heterogeneous than the one-dimensional organizational approach can handle.
We do not need bans of such totality with such devastating consequences for established, responsible programs like tennis. We need leaders to embrace the complexity of sport practice, to understand its diversity, to be involved with students and listen to their voices, to be firm on value considerations yet sympathetic to the contingency of situations. Prop 2-53 and the leadership of Mr. Bridges, et.al, fails at the level of administrative understanding and at the level of human values.
This legislation should be amended to respond to the obvious and necessary differentiation of contemporary sport.
Mike Mullan is the men's tennis coach at Swarthmore College.
Opinions -- As TV rights fees increase, so does pay-for-play debate
Indianapolis Star
Discussing ramifications of the NCAA's new television contract with CBS Sports:
"Let's say you do pay the players. Which ones? Do you pay male basketball players, but not females? At Michigan, for example, do you pay the football players, who generate lots of revenue, but not the hockey players, who generate less, or the track team, which generates none? Do you risk a reverse discrimination suit by paying the players in sports that have a significant minority representation (basketball and football) but not in those sports that are mostly white (tennis, swimming, golf)? ...
"It will only raise the ante. It's silly to think paying a basketball player $100 a month will keep him in school and somehow dissuade him from leaving early for the NBA, where the per diem is almost $100 a day. It's ludicrous to think any system for paying student-athletes in particular sports but not all sports would make it through the courts. The only ones who would reap profits would be the lawyers."
Billy Packer, college basketball commentator
Richmond (Virginia) Times Dispatch
"I cannot understand why this (paying athletes) is still a question. There are 280,000 NCAA athletes. The female rower at Stanford has the same rights as the Heisman Trophy winner at Wisconsin. There will never be a situation where college athletes are going to be paid. It should be a moot point. ...
"If the (college) presidents really want to create some credibility, how about standing up and saying, 'No coach will ever be hired at my school who is presently under contract at another school. Nor will I ever fire a coach who has a contract with my school.' Do you realize how many millions of dollars presently are being spent by NCAA schools to pay off coaches who had time remaining?
"How can they tell a kid, 'Don't leave us early,' then turn around and hire a coach under contract? Also, say to kids in minor sports programs, 'We don't have enough money to give you the proper equipment because we've got to spend $400,000 to pay off the football coach we fired.' "
