National Collegiate Athletic Association
NCAA News Archive - 2000
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Opinions
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Jim Haney, executive director
National Association of Basketball Coaches
New York Times
Discussing proposed legislation that would allow under specific circumstances prospective student-athletes to accept compensation or prize money for athletics participation before college enrollment:
"Among coaches there's a concern with what we call the professional gunslinger. You've got this guy who's been a pro, coming back for a year or two to help a team win the conference or go to the NCAA tournament. The second concern is that you create a difference. All of a sudden these guys come back, they've got automobiles; they've got money in their pockets. You have two different kinds of student-athletes in your program: one guy who's sitting there with a bunch of money in the bank, the other guy who's limited to tuition room, board and books."
Christine Grant, chair
NCAA Amatuerism and Agents Subcommittee
New York Times
"We hear that we are out to destroy sports. We've been accused of that. But we're out to make sports better for the student-athletes."
Vince Dooley, director of athletics
University of Georgia
Atlanta Journal and Constitution
"I can have some empathy for a young man if he leaves for a year, thinks he's made a mistake and wants to come back. But anything more than a year would be going too far."
Basketball issues
Lamar Odom, professional basketball player
New York Times
"To tell you the truth, this is the reason why kids are going to the NBA. The situation with the high-school coaches and the AAU coaches and the college coaches -- a lot of it gets out of hand."
Harvey Araton, columnist
New York Times
"(Coaches) should be more concerned about what a sport like college basketball is doing for the collective reputation of young African-American men, too often cast as academic losers who would trade their future for trinkets. Would the legion of white hockey jocks hold up under such scrutiny? Doubtful, but their developmental system for the pros does not require a minimum College Board score."
Gambling
Editorial
The Christian Science Monitor
Discussing proposed federal legislation to ban all gambling on college sports:
"Current anti-gambling measures should be strongly enforced, especially on campuses. But that effort is made more difficult by the aura of legality given sports wagering by Las Vegas come-ons, published betting lines in newspapers, and, of course, the Web sites.
"A federal law making betting on amateur sports illegal everywhere might step on local toes. But it's a legitimate exercise of federal power to regulate interstate commerce. (Wagering through Web sites based off-shore poses special enforcement problems.)
"The proposed legislation would draw a useful line at a time when there seem to be few bounds to the country's tolerance for gambling."