The NCAA is using half a face to tell the whole story. Throughout the 2002-03 championship seasons, the Association has used a split-screen approach to explain how student-athletes balance high-caliber athletics competition with learning and character to prepare for life after college.

"There are 360,000 NCAA student-athletes, and just about all of us will be going pro in something other than sports," says a shot putter at the end of a commercial showing his athletics interests on one side of the screen and his academic pursuits on the other. In another of the 30-second TV spots, a swimmer says, "I swim the 200. I study sociology. I grind out laps. I cram for tests. I race nationals. I take finals. And when I finish, I'll be ready to start." A third uses a male and a female basketball player to depict the student-athlete balancing act.

The television spots, which use a "balance line" to purposely split the screen, aired enough times during the Division I Men's and Women's Basketball Championships this year that viewers couldn't help but understand that every dunk or three-pointer had a reciprocating midterm or research paper to go along with it.

The message is delivered by people who certainly understand it. The faces on the screen aren't those of professional actors but of former NCAA student-athletes who lived the lives they preach.

"The ad I did summed me up as a person," said Josh Black, who reached all-America status on the field and in the classroom while a shot putter at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "The message from the one that I did ('most of us are going pro in something other than sports') is very true to life.

"Sometimes people develop stereotypes based on a limited view or graduation statistics in high-profile football or men's basketball programs. People generalize that and assume that all NCAA student-athletes fit that mold. But that's a misrepresentation of data, because the vast majority of us are students who do athletics on the side. We gain from athletics, but we don't plan on making them a profession."

The swimmer, Melody Lomboy, was a school-record holder and four-year scholar-athlete at the University of California, Irvine. Her walk-out line, "And when I finish, I'll be ready to start," holds true in her life as well. Lomboy, who was diagnosed with leukemia at age 6, has been starting ever since.

"People often think that getting an athletics scholarship means that you're not up to par academically," she said. "They sometimes look up to academic scholarships and look down on athletics scholarships. Instead of praising you for working out and taking 24 units, they see you as just a jock. It was exciting to tell people that not only do I swim competitively, I also am a double major, and I have aspirations and goals that go beyond just swimming."

Black and Lomboy joined former basketball student-athletes Tyler Murphy of the University of Southern California; Alana Collins of California State University, Northridge; and Kevin Johnson of the University of California, Santa Barbara, in making the campaign. And though selecting those five was tough to do, finding a pool from which to choose them wasn't.

"We wish we could've made 30 commercials instead of three," said Paul Hastings, a senior vice-president at Young & Rubicam San Francisco, the advertising agency responsible for developing the creative concept for the campaign. "There were so many accomplished and interesting candidates who would have been appropriate."

Hastings said the four student-athletes his group selected in the end stood out as having "great camera presence, and they were sincere and truthful." The group also was diverse in ethnicity, gender and division representation.

"Up front, you'd say this would be difficult to find these folks," Hastings said. "But in the end, the NCAA was incredibly cooperative in getting us in contact with schools, the athletics directors were extremely helpful in getting us in contact with the students, and the students thought it was the best thing ever."

"Friends called me afterward and said, 'Hey, you're on the side of a bus,'" said Collins, who graduated from Cal State Northridge in 1996. "So I started looking more closely at all the buses I saw."

"I had been in Los Angeles for about a year when I heard about the PSAs," said Black. "I said to myself, you know what, this is an opportunity you don't get very often, so I went for it."

The campaign was almost all word of mouth. The NCAA contacted sports information directors in the Southern California area about student-athletes who may have compelling stories to tell, and that prompted some interest, but it didn't guarantee that any of the applicants would be skilled actors. Though Lomboy and Collins have dabbled in the field and actually have agents, none of them is a film regular.

Black, in fact, had no experience at all. He was shocked to find 70 technicians and support staff waiting for him at his shoot.

"In the end it was kind of like performing at a big meet, with a stadium of people watching me," said the photogenic chemical engineer who currently is in graduate school at California Institute of Technology. "I felt absolutely at ease during the filming of the athletics portion. I experienced a little bit of stage fright during the speaking portion because I was out of my element, but during the throwing part I felt very much at ease. I was just doing what I was trained to do so many times before."

Delivering the message

Black was a two-time Division III all-American in the hammer throw and an accomplished shot putter and discus thrower as well. He's helping out as an assistant track coach at Caltech while pursuing a graduate degree in chemical engineering.

Lomboy is training to be a yoga instructor. Her shoot was unusual just because of the demands of filming in the water. One camera followed her underwater while another was positioned just inches from her face as she swam the butterfly. Lomboy said she was in and out of the pool for about 10 hours and mindful that such prolonged exposure to the water leaves a person "all pruned up."

"She was a trouper," Hastings said. "Each time she has to have a fresh face. The last time has to look like the first time. And then it's, 'Oh, would you mind coming over here and reading your lines now?'

"The difficult part for all of the student-athletes, and you have to respect them for this, was that in the spots, the left side has them doing their sport and on the right side they're speaking. All that was shot in one day."

From all accounts, the TV spots and the print ads derived from them have been a hit, and more are planned for next year. The ads are just part of a multifaceted branding campaign the NCAA is undertaking through the many platforms made available from the bundled-rights agreement with CBS and ESPN.

JoJo Rinebold, NCAA director of broadcasting and media integration, said the TV spots are important for the NCAA, but they should not be the sole brand driver.

"The NCAA has an opportunity not only through this campaign but also through the way our events are presented by CBS and ESPN," she said. "If you watch the championship telecasts, the 'NCAA on Campus' show or even studio shows and ancillary programming, you will notice an increased emphasis in telling the story of the student-athlete both on and off the field.

"By seeing this evidence consistently and repeatedly, the NCAA brand can come to life for the general public, NCAA member institutions and the 360,000 student-athletes mentioned in the PSAs."

Hastings agreed, emphasizing that the campaign needs to be more than just television.

"The more it becomes a brand campaign that the whole organization embraces, the more successful it will be," he said. "Television, as it is with for-profit and nonprofit organizations alike, often serves as a foundation that helps inform not only the people you want to speak to, but also the ones within your own organization. They get the message, too, so it also has an internal focus that helps people understand, OK, that's who we are and what our mission is."

Black said he thinks student-athletes generally have a sense of the NCAA mission; however, the public develops stereotypes that the Association must try to overcome.

"During the programming in which the PSAs were broadcast (March Madness), I'm sure a lot of people had stereotypes that those athletes are anything but well-rounded or anything but scholars," Black said. "These PSAs show that there are a lot more athletes than people realize -- even I didn't know there were 360,000 of us."

"The PSAs also will help those student-athletes who 'continue' the stereotype," Lomboy said. "In every program, there are a few who aren't there for school. Not everyone will go pro and not everyone will go to the Olympics and not everyone will play in the NBA. You have to have something else. You can't just concentrate your life on being an athlete."