DALLAS — Step into a hotel hosting the Regional Rules Seminars — such as the Hyatt Regency at Reunion here recently — and you’ll know from the signs and from people conversing around the lobby that this is an NCAA event.

It’s fair to say things have changed considerably since the Association first began offering the educational sessions for its membership during the late 1980s.

"One of the first seminars, I’ll never forget, I was on a ladder with a staple gun putting up a greeting board at the registration area — and sweating," says Kevin Lennon, then an NCAA director of compliance services but now vice president for membership services. "And after people said, ‘Kevin, your session is ready to start,’ I’m running to the room — still sweating. That’s where we started off."

These days, staff members still are working hard to accomplish the seminars’ original mission: help the Association’s membership keep up to date with and understand the NCAA’s rules and procedures. But they’ve polished the program quite a bit since those early days when they sweated over more than just the content of the sessions, creating what many today regard as "can’t miss" events.

"For a significant segment of the membership, they are even more important than the Convention," says Delise O’Meally, NCAA director of governance and membership, who began presenting seminar sessions in 1998 and then served as lead adminstrator for the event before assuming her current duties two years ago.

"I keep coming back because they’re so beneficial," says Mindy Mangels, associate director of athletics at Wellesley College and one of about 2,200 attendees at seminars this year in San Diego and Dallas. "You hear people say to ‘keep it real,’ and I think this is where you keep it real — this is where I get to apply what I do on a daily basis."

"If my AD said, ‘You’ve been going to four professional kinds of meetings a year and we can’t afford to do that anymore — you’re going to have to choose one’ — this would be it," says Carrie Doyle, associate director of athletics for compliance and senior woman administrator at the University of New Hampshire. "The regional seminars would be it — hands down, no questions asked."

In many ways, the seminars are "it" for membership services staff members, too.

"We approach this event as our crown jewel, where we interact with the membership," says Wendy Walters, NCAA director of membership services and the seminars’ current lead administrator. "We always want to impart a very good impression, because we’re the people they’re going to have to work with later."

Staff planning for each year’s seminars begins months in advance, starting with selection of topics and then moving to organizing the sessions and selecting speakers.

The seminars feature more than 120 sessions at each site — mostly focusing on administration of eligibility, amateurism, recruiting, financial aid, and playing and practice seasons rules, but also touching on hot topics like sports wagering and recent changes in legislation governing promotional activities.

In recent years, the staff has stepped up its preparatory work —- going so far as to stage mock seminar sessions in advance to prepare for possible questions from participants.

"You want people to have confidence that they can look to the staff to provide good counsel, and a good response," Lennon said. "We value that very highly. We put a lot of effort into our presentation planning — the quality of the PowerPoints, and information delivery."

But the seminars also serve a purpose beyond the sessions.

"It’s an opportunity for our people to build relationships, so if later we’re discussing a waiver in a phone call, we’re not just a random voice in membership services," Walters said. "They’ll know we’re from the same town, or played the same sport they played, or there’s some other commonality."

"If you’ve interacted here with someone in a session or in the hallways, and then they call you later about something else, nine times out of 10 they’ll say, ‘Remember that I talked to you at regional seminars? How are you doing, how are things going?’ said Matt Banker, NCAA assistant director of membership services. "So there’s that connection."

For many who serve in key positions at member institutions — as compliance directors, senior woman administrators, faculty athletics representatives and, increasingly in recent years, academic, admissions and financial aid officers — the seminars are the only opportunity to visit face to face with NCAA staff members with whom they otherwise interact only by telephone or e-mail.

The registrants are a mix of seminar veterans — such as Doyle, a former NCAA director of student-athlete reinstatement who joined the staff at New Hampshire two years ago — and newcomers like the administrator/coach from a Division III provisional-member school who leaned over to another attendee at a seminar session and said, "It’s good to be able to put a name with a face."

Doyle — who has been on both sides of that relationship as an NCAA staff member presenting sessions at seminars and now as an institutional administrator working to keep up with rules changes — says having access to the "experts" on application of the rules is invaluable.

"If I want to talk to someone about how to do stuff, I want to talk to the staff — the people who actually can tell me how things apply properly," she said. "I did that here — I talked to a couple of staff members about my concerns about how specific pieces of new legislation are going to apply to my institution, and they further clarified how we can do what we want to do on our campus, so that it will be permissible."

The seminars are intended to provide an opportunity for participants to obtain important information and useful advice — but they have become something more.

As hundreds of attendees gathered for a reception at the Dallas seminar, it was obvious the event also has become a gathering place for people who work in intercollegiate athletics — much like the annual NCAA Convention. In fact, more institutional personnel attended regional seminars this year than attended the most recent Convention in Indianapolis, where a little more than 2,100 institutional delegates were registered.

A staff count during the 2005 seminars revealed that more than 900 member institutions were represented by at least one attendee — about 85 percent of the Association’s active and provisional members.

The seminars have a different purpose than the Convention. "This caters more to the practitioner...it’s more hands-on information that helps them do their job," Lennon said. But they also increasingly have assumed a role that traditionally has been a purpose of the Convention: They are a place for the NCAA membership to share ideas, trade tips and socialize.

In fact, the seminars provide the only opportunity to experience being part of the Association for many who register to attend.

"These are people who generally don’t get the opportunity to go to the Convention...and it’s these people’s opportunity to see the Association as an association," O’Meally said. "They have a chance to interact; you see a lot of small group gatherings. You see postings of job opportunities."

Lennon suggested the seminars even may have assumed a Convention role that was diminished by federation of the Association in 1997.

"Even though there are division-specific sessions, my sense is that there is more interaction here among divisions," he said. "You see it at the reception, and you see it in the hallway conversations. At the Convention, we have a business session, then everyone goes into a conference meeting. Here, there’s more mingling. In a sense, the unstructured time is where you get some of the best exchange of information."

A Division III institutional administrator attending her first seminar in Dallas said she was benefiting as much from interaction with other attendees as from the sessions themselves.

"It’s helpful to come here and talk to other administrators, and colleagues," said Kristin Maile, who has just been named director of athletics at Cedar Crest College after serving as an associate athletics director at Wellesley. "You end up learning about more than rules and compliance, just talking about many different aspects of your work.

"There are questions I have, or areas I have a real interest in, and I can strike up a conversation about that," she said. "Then there are other things people say and I think, oh, I never thought of doing that, or I’ve never had that experience. I store it away and I can draw on it in the future."

Registrants aren’t the only beneficiaries of those exchanges of information, Lennon said. Staff members are listening to what attendees say, too.

"Obviously the sharing of information, back and forth, is critical," he said. "As rules change and as compliance strategies evolve, we have some expertise that we can then share with a broader audience, and that I think helps them. Conversely, we come away as a staff with new insights about the issues from the attendees. That happens both in the sessions and in the hallway conversations — we get the real-world, ‘here’s what’s going on out there.’ That back and forth information-sharing is invaluable."

After spending years focusing on its messages and polishing presentations for the seminars, the staff recently has given more attention to improving the event itself.

In recent years, more effort has been made to provide attendees with opportunities to interact socially. In Dallas, the city’s nearby historic Union Station and its ornate main waiting room provided an attractive setting for evening receptions where registrants mingled and talked shop. In May, the San Diego seminar featured a harbor cruise.

Other seminars have featured such activities as expeditions to baseball games or tourist attractions, in addition to offering service-oriented amenities like online registration and a lounge with Internet access.

As the seminars have grown, they also have begun taking on a familiar attribute of Association gatherings — they look and feel more and more like an NCAA event.

"What was important for me this year was the signage, and making it look like an NCAA event," Walters said. "That’s very new for us. Really, the only kind of signage we had previously was what you see outside each room (message boards announcing session topics). We didn’t have the sense of, ‘I’m at an NCAA event.’ "

In Dallas, attendees were greeted at the hotel entrance with a lighted NCAA logo on a pillar, and NCAA banners adorned the lobbies outside meeting rooms.

"The other day I saw people taking pictures by their divisional banner, which is a little thing, but kind of nice," Walters said.

Thinking back to his own early experience at the seminars, Lennon appreciates how much better the meeting place looks than in those days when he was stapling signs at the registration booth.

"I’d say it’s a little more professional of an appearance now with the NCAA brand present," he said. "I don’t think we talked about branding much in the ’80s. It was just get in and get out."

Still, for all of the recent attention to appearances, membership services staff members still are focused on the content of the seminars — and ensuring that those who attend are getting what they need from the sessions. The staff carefully reviews registrants’ evaluations of the sessions, using them to decide each year which topics are popular and should be repeated, as well as determining what information attendees need most.

The effort produces good reviews from those who are repeat participants in the seminars.

"It seems to me the staff is being appropriately creative in terms of continually making this gathering fresh and interesting," Doyle said. "It could be stagnant if we’re talking about the same thing every year, but they do a great job of putting this on. They may not get the kind of applause at the end of a session that reflects it, but I think the membership is enormously grateful for their effort."

"They get better every year," Wellesley’s Mangels agreed. "I think the NCAA really takes the feedback that we give and really changes things to be better. It has really changed even in the past four years — the topics, and how it’s structured."

Judging from growing attendance in recent years, those efforts are paying off as more attendees regard the seminars as a "can’t miss" annual event.

"I think it’s vital," Mengels said. "I didn’t come last year, and I felt I was lost — I felt like I missed out on a year."

"Without the regional seminars, we’d all be much less knowledgeable about how the rules are supposed to be applied, in all different kinds of areas," Doyle said.