The NCAA's athletics certification program is turning 2.

Now that 306 Division I schools have completed the Association's institutional self-study tool for college athletics that was adopted at the 1993 NCAA Convention, it's time to start the second cycle. And with the first round complete, the NCAA's Division I Committee on Athletics Certification is looking forward to a smooth transition from what had been varying levels of uncertainty to what now should be considered old hat.

The second cycle, a 10-year span instead of the first cycle's five, will focus on old themes as well as some new wrinkles. Certification's four primary components -- governance and commitment to rules compliance, academic integrity, fiscal integrity and commitment to equity -- remain in place, and the structure of peer-review visits and self-study is well-entrenched.

But a couple of changes have been implemented within the components, primarily in the manner in which they are organized. First, there has been a change to the commitment to equity component that introduces a sportsmanship and ethical conduct operating principle into the equity area of the study. Also, a review of schools' provisions for student-athletes grievance or appeals procedures in various student-athlete welfare areas has been added to the student-athlete welfare operating principle. That has changed the equity component to the "Equity, Welfare and Sportsmanship" area of study.

Second, the academic integrity component has been refined to allow schools to review academic profiles and graduation rates of student-athlete subgroups in addition to student-athletes as a whole. The program used to require the review based on admission profiles and graduation rates by sport. Now each school is asked to look for specific subgroups to identify any unique academic profile in a given sport that needs attention.

The goals of the program remain unaltered: to increase understanding of athletics through campus-wide involvement in the institutional self-study. The program always has maintained that by opening the athletics operation up to campus scrutiny, schools realize more institutional control, and more campus constituents will recognize the positive impact college athletics has upon the university and the community.

For the most part, those goals have been accomplished through the program's first cycle.

"It has been helpful to institutions across the country in terms of personnel on campus getting to understand more of the positive aspects of their athletics programs," said longtime certification committee member Andrea Seger, who directs the athletics department at Ball State University.

The 10-year interval

Seger said her group expects certification to be a smoother ride the second time around. When the program was implemented, not many people -- those being reviewed and those doing the reviewing -- knew quite what to expect. But standards have evolved over time and peer review has become more consistent so that schools progressing through the second cycle shouldn't be faced with too many unknowns.

"We've put the second-cycle requirements in place so that they're pretty straight-forward," Seger said. "If schools follow what we've asked for, they shouldn't have a difficult time."

There are several advantages with the 10-year interval as opposed to five -- more than just the obvious reduced time crunch. More campus personnel have been through the process and are less likely to be intimidated a second time. Schools know what's involved in assembling campus committees and processing the paperwork -- what may have started from scratch years ago may now just be a matter of updating. The NCAA also is more skilled at training its peer-review teams. In fact, the 10-year interval should allow for the pool of peer reviewers to be reduced, thus maintaining -- perhaps even improving -- the quality of the peer reviewers.

All those factors figure to reduce anxiety, but there are risks in the expanded interval as well.

The 10-year interval was approved at the 1997 Convention in part to coincide with regional accreditation, which schools must do typically once every 10 years. The challenge is that more and more schools are realizing increased turnover in athletics and other campus personnel. These days, it may be unrealistic to expect a school to have a core group of administrators in place for a 10-year period.

Such transition could compromise even the best-laid plans for compliance with the components of certification.

"As much as we want to say that an institution is held accountable regardless who the president, vice-president for academic affairs or the athletics director is, the reality is that when it comes to the commitment of resources and strategic planning at a given school, changes at the board of trustee level or at the president level can have a significant influence," said committee member Robert A. Chernak, vice-president for student and academic support services at George Washington University.

"There also may be circumstances that evolve at schools since those initial plans were developed that change the context," Chernak added. "Changes in funding, expansion in enrollment, conference affiliation, athletics philosophy, upgrades from I-AA to I-A football -- all those are possible during a 10-year period."

The equity challenge

One of the aspects of certification that figures to remain constant for the program's second cycle is that the equity component will be the one area of study with which schools will struggle most.

Of the 33 institutions that failed to be certified without conditions during the first cycle, most fell short in the gender and ethnic diversity component. That component started out as -- and likely remains -- the most subjective of the four. In fact, in the early years of certification, what it took to be in compliance as far as gender and ethnic diversity was concerned was less defined than it is now. As schools asked for guidance, and as the committee worked to provide it, the compliance benchmark rose.

"It was a lot easier to measure conformity on those other operating principles, whereas in the equity component, there wasn't originally a definition of what constituted an acceptable plan," Chernak said. "So as the committee began to review those early schools, a lot of issues came up that weren't really contemplated as being issues."

Chernak said schools struggled with what constituted an acceptable plan, and once that was determined, who would monitor it. Schools also didn't know whether an acceptable plan meant that it would be in place for one, two, five, 10 or 20 years -- there was no prescribed length of application, and no pattern or precedent for growth.

"It's the one area in the first cycle that probably was the most disparate in terms of the way schools were evaluated," he said.

That disparity may come up again. The second cycle poses an interesting dilemma for the committee, which must attempt to evaluate the progress of schools certified early in the first cycle that may have met standards that wouldn't meet the new benchmark established later in the cycle. In other words, will the committee hold some schools accountable to a different standard?

Chernak said the committee is aware of the potential for a discrepancy and will ensure that it handles the review of the equity component, in essence, equitably.

"The committee always has attempted to have a reasonable approach to this type of thing. The evolving standards coupled with any known external changes in the environment (through interpretations from OCR or changes in law) are somehow incorporated into the pragmatics of the evaluation," he said.

James E. Walker, president at Middle Tennessee State University and chair of the committee, said most important in the committee's review of a school's equity plan is to be shown some positive movement. Schools shouldn't be concerned whether their plans meet a bar that is constantly being raised, as long as they themselves realize the need to raise their own bar.

"The intentions overall for certification were that we would be continually raising the bar -- not drastically or in a way that our member schools could not meet, but certainly to make sure that they were living by a set of guiding principles that we feel athletics at the Division I level should attain," Walker said.

Seger said the committee will be looking for progress -- and accountability -- in the equity areas.

"What we're looking for is that the plans that were put in place during the first cycle have indeed been active," she said. "People become afraid sometimes and think, 'What's going to happen if we don't do our plan exactly as written?' The committee understands that institutions sometimes make changes in their plans as they go along, but our intent is to ensure that schools are moving forward."

Seger also said if a school seems to be lagging behind in the equity area, it will need to have a valid explanation.

"They need to show that they've done something with the plans they developed during the first cycle, and if they've modified those plans, they need to explain why," she said.

As for new plans -- particularly in the equity area of study -- the committee also believes that schools have more resources upon which to draw. There are even a couple of sample formats offered in the certification handbook that illustrate means by which schools can construct a strategy.

It's all part of an overall scheme to reduce the anxiety inherent in any type of self-study.

"If you asked anyone involved in college accreditation whether they like it, they'd probably say 'not much,' and people look at the certification program a little bit in the same way," Seger said. "People do understand, though, that in most cases it's going to be a positive experience as much as one of these types of things can be."

A second positive experience, for most.

What's new

A list of some of the changes in the athletics certification program as Division I schools prepare for the program's second cycle:

* 10-year cycle instead of five-year cycle.

* Only those schools with eight or more years between evaluation visits will be subject to the interim-report requirement.

* New equity, welfare and sportsmanship component concentrates on schools' commitment to ensuring sportsmanship and student-athlete welfare.

* Revised academic integrity component allows schools to focus on academic profiles of student-athlete subgroups.

* Paperwork reduced by allowing schools to provide data from completed NCAA Graduation-Rates supplemental forms and Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act/NCAA Gender-Equity Survey reporting forms.

* 10-year cycle allows reduction in peer-review pool, which should maintain a high quality of peer-review teams.

* 10-year cycle will allow schools from the same conference to be more evenly spread out, reducing burden on conference offices.

* Schools' placement in second cycle, when desired, is in conjunction with their regional accreditation insofar as possible.