A Division I working group assembled to help student-athletes, coaches and athletics administrators understand and comply with the "20-hour" rule has disseminated a comprehensive package of education materials to address the issue.

The package includes reference materials that define countable athletically related activities, sample agendas and teaching points to be used during educational sessions among coaches, administrators and student-athletes, and suggestions for monitoring daily and weekly hour limitations. The package has been distributed to Division I compliance coordinators, Student-Athlete Advisory Committee members and the Collegiate Conference Association Compliance Administrators. The educational materials also are available on the administrators homepage at www.ncaa.org.

The working group -- composed of current members of the Division I Management Council, current and former members of the Division I Championships/Competition Cabinet's playing and practice seasons subcommittee, coaches and student-athletes -- was appointed after the 2003 NCAA Convention when both the Council and Board of Directors heard concerns from student-athletes that the rule limiting their participation in countable athletically related activities was both grossly misunderstand and in many cases abused.

The group was established this summer and charged with enhancing educational efforts concerning the rule and suggesting ways for campus personnel to monitor its application. The working group, as well as student-athletes, agreed that a concerted educational effort is a better solution at this time than attempting to change the rule through legislation. Student-athletes, in fact, have said that the 20-hour rule is appropriate as long as it is adhered to. What has complicated the rule is the determination of what is a countable athletically related activity, and whether some noncountable voluntary training activities are in fact mandatory. Student-athletes also are finding increasing demands on their time in addition to countable athletically related activities, such as fund-raising, community service and recruiting.

But Jerry Kingston, faculty athletics representative at Arizona State University and chair of the working group, said his committee's charge was to educate student-athletes and administrators first and foremost on the current climate.

"A great deal of the difficulty with the present time-limitations rule is that people have not understood it," he said. "We've been hearing from the SAAC and other students on individual campuses that it's very hard for them to know whether there is compliance with the rule when they don't completely understand it."

Kingston said he expects one of the documents in the educational package -- a chart that defines countable athletically related activities -- to be prominently displayed in locations on campus where student-athletes will see it, such as locker rooms, training rooms and team meeting areas.

"The single-best most useful attachment is the chart detailing the dos and don'ts," Kingston said. "That's going to be in locker rooms, on bulletin boards and in student services areas, areas where student-athletes are. We worked hard to provide information in a simple and clear format."

Other attachments detail the differences between countable activities during the season and out of season, what constitutes a "voluntary" activity, and an agenda for walking through all the nuances of the rule with student-athletes, coaches and administrators. The packet also includes a "best practices" document for monitoring the 20-hour rule, including randomly polling student-athletes, establishing a "comment box," implementing practice logs for student-athletes to maintain, or even having compliance staff attend practices and observe whether the information on the written record is consistent with what actually is taking place.

"The way this group began was to determine the very best approach we could take to help students and others understand the rules that we now have," Kingston said. "What we ended up with are materials that I believe are as inclusive and comprehensive as possible to help people on our campuses better understand what the rules currently are."