The NCAA championships and information technology staffs have teamed to create a pair of tools that should facilitate two elements of championships administration.

The first is an electronic version of the evaluation form to aid with the selection of championship sites. The other is an electronic form that will permit conferences to submit automatic-qualification information through the Internet.

Troy L. Arthur, NCAA associate director of championships, said the site-evaluation form should ease administrative burdens for institutions that desire to host NCAA championship events. Until now, the process has required such institutions to fill out annually a paper bid packet that includes budgetary information and the site-evaluation form. The site-evaluation form asks for information such as seating capacity, dimensions, playing surface, dressing rooms, ability to accommodate media and so on.

The next phase of the initiative will include access to proposed budgets and key-contact forms. However, the membership will have the immediate ability to submit site-evaluation information through the Internet, which will be a significant benefit for those institutions that host championships.

Brad Alderson, NCAA manager of software development, said that the program will be password protected, meaning that only administrators at the applying institution will be able to access the form for their school. The form itself mirrors the previous paper document, although Arthur said that recent testing identified a few ways in which the form itself could be improved.

The NCAA will advise member institutions when applications will be accepted for hosting various rounds of championship events. The form will be available throughout the year so institutions can complete the form at their leisure. There will be periods when the site is blocked, such as during championship selections. The form will be reviewed and updated each year by the sports committees.

Once an individual logs on using the institution's password, Alderson said a list of sports the school sponsors will appear. The administrator then will be able to click on the championship it wants to host and provide the needed information.

"It's very straightforward," Alderson said. "If you've ever ordered anything online, you won't have any problems with this."

One primary benefit is that the form will provide a record of the previous submission. That is important because the facilities at most institutions do not change from year to year. While individual elements of the site evaluation may need to be updated, in general, the electronic form will save administrators the trouble of re-entering the same information year after year. The applying institution will be able to print a copy of its submission by using Adobe Acrobat, which is available at no charge through NCAA Online and other sources.

"It's a tremendous help," said Mike Covone, director of athletics at Barry University, one of the institutions that participated in the pilot. "It's a benefit in that the data are now online and much more accessible for institutions and administrators to complete in a more timely fashion.

"The old way obviously took more time. Now we can create databases and have a history of facilities readily available."

Arthur said the program was tested this fall in soccer. A total of 24 public and private institutions were chosen, and 15 participated. Twelve were selected from Division I, and six each were from Divisions II and III. The entire pool was divided equally among men's and women's championships. Pilot participants were asked five questions: Is it easy to operate? What do you like about it? What do you dislike? What would you change? What additional comments do you have? The feedback led the staff to eliminate a few redundancies and to modify elements such as font sizes, Alderson said.

"This was strictly a test and was not used to select any sites," Arthur said. "We printed out the form and gave it to the soccer committees and asked them if this is what they needed.

"Our goal is to eliminate the hard copies of the facility form, to develop a form that can be used by all sports and to save money through a reduction in printing and overnight shipping costs. We're out of the pilot stage now, but we're still in a testing stage. We hope to go full bore next year."

Beginning in February, the process will go through a "beta" testing phase for spring championships, when it actually will be used to select sites. Alderson said the system should work as well as it did with the pilot group; however, exposure to the full membership may identify other ways in which improvements can be made. Any necessary changes will be made over the summer, with the final version being available for all championships beginning in the fall.

The program will require Netscape 4.73 or Microsoft Explorer 5.0 or higher. It does not matter if the applicant is using Macintosh or Windows operating systems.

Automatic qualification

The electronic version of the automatic-qualification form is expected to bring some of the same benefits as the online site-evaluation form. Conferences will be able to submit the form through the Internet and will have a readily available record of the information that was submitted the previous year.

The electronic automatic-qualification form will seek essentially the same information as the current paper document. That information includes items such as the number of institutions sponsoring the sport in question, how the conference champion is determined, the format of the conference championship, dates of competition, how long institutions have been members of the conference and enforcement issues.

Through this system, the NCAA will use the form to provide to the conference the institutions that it knows to be members, thus reducing the amount of data input for the conference. If an institution is a member of a conference and is not listed, the process will serve as a check for the Association, which will adjust its membership database accordingly.

Alderson said the automatic-qualification form is still in the testing phase. Rollout is expected in the spring.

"We want to do this gradually," Alderson said. "We don't want to throw too much at the membership too quickly, and we want to make sure we get it right."

Arthur said the next major initiative in this area likely will be to explore the possibility of submitting financial reports electronically.