In addition to Division I's Saturday morning legislative review session at this year's Convention, a Division I Issues Forum will be conducted Sunday, January 11, from 8:30 a. m. to noon. The forum will be similar to the Division I forums that were held on Monday morning at previous Conventions.

The newly designed forum will be a companion piece to the legislative review meeting the previous day and will provide Division I members with another opportunity to educate themselves on current issues. The lineup for the forum includes a presentation from the Division I Women's Basketball Issues Committee, a group that has been working for the last two years on marketing, promotion and growth issues in the sport. The chair of the committee, University of Denver Athletics Director M. Dianne Murphy, will lead the presentation.

Forum participants also will hear from representatives of the playing and practice seasons subcommittee of the Championships/
Competition Cabinet along with members from a working group recently appointed to address student-athlete time-demand issues, specifically the amount of athletically related activities student-athletes are required or expected to perform in a given day or week.

The 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, and 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 misunderstood and, in many cases, abused.

Chaired by Jerry Kingston, faculty athletics representative at Arizona State University, the group already has assembled and distributed a comprehensive package of education materials about the so-called 20-hour rule to Division I compliance coordinators, Student-Athlete Advisory Committee members and the Collegiate Conference Association Compliance Admini-
strators. The educational materials also are available on the administrators home page at www.ncaa.org.

Also on the forum agenda is an update on proposed changes in the Division I athletics certification program. After a thorough review process involving internal and external constituencies, the Division I Committee on Athletics Certification has recommended several changes intended to increase efficiency and reduce the scope of the program. At the forefront of the suggested changes is elimination of four operating principles and discontinuation of the interim-report process. The committee hopes to implement those initiatives as soon as possible, through noncontroversial or emergency legislation, in response to membership calls to streamline the program.

Finally, the forum will include another educational session on the incentives/disincentives structure.

Though the Management Council meeting will be going on at the same time, attendance at the forum still is expected to be high.

In previous years, the Division I forum on Monday was the only opportunity at the Convention for members to hear about contemporary issues and proposals in a group setting, said Beth DeBauche, NCAA director of Division I. The new Convention programming for Division I allows for legislative education and debate at the Saturday legislative review session, followed by a more educationally based agenda at the Sunday issues forum.

Between the two sessions, members will get a good idea of the short-term and long-term issues at stake and benefit from the exchange of ideas among the group. We expect good crowds at both meetings.