Recognizing that vacation time isn’t down time for student-athletes preparing for next season, the NCAA is planning to conduct drug testing during summer months beginning this year.

Acting on authority granted in Bylaws 18.4.1.5.2 and 21.2.2.2, the NCAA Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports has authorized summer testing at Division I institutions, focusing this year on football and baseball.

“This has been coming for some time,” said Mary Wilfert, NCAA associate director of education outreach and staff liaison to the competitive-safeguards committee. “We’ve previously been hesitant to test into the summer months, because of concerns about extending student-athletes’ participation in a sport beyond a traditional season and also logistical considerations.

“But the reality is that student-athletes don’t take the summer off,” she said.

The National Center for Drug Free Sport, Inc., which conducts testing for the Association, will advise institutions in an April memorandum on how to prepare for the summer initiative.

Institutions will be instructed to designate a staff member to serve as a site coordinator for summer testing. Site coordinators will be responsible for contacting and notifying randomly selected student-athletes of their selection for testing, and for assisting Drug Free Sport in arranging collections.

Testing likely will include student-athletes who are not physically present on campuses, Wilfert said. As a result, testing may occur at homes, jobs or other locations, though the program will adhere in all other respects to the protocol used in the NCAA’s year-round testing program — including its chain of custody, confidentiality, penalty and appeal procedures.

While the summer program will be limited in scope and its primary focus will be football and baseball, all Division I institutions are subject to inclusion and student-athletes from any Division I sport could be selected for testing, said Frank Uryasz, Drug Free Sport president.

“This is just an extension of the year-round program, which traditionally has ended when the second semester or third trimester ended,” he said. “All Division I sports are included in the year-round testing program, so they can expect to be included in summer testing, too.”

Uryasz added that extending testing into the summer is a logical next step in the NCAA program.

“We started with football, we added track, then we added all sports in Divisions I and II, and now we’re closing the gap in the summer — it’s a progression, and it’s based on a desire to continue to improve the program,” he said. “We don’t see it as a new program; it’s just extending the one that we have.”

Closing the window

Wilfert said NCAA legislation permits testing any time during the year, and added student-athletes are placed on notice by the drug-testing consent form that testing can occur any time between when they sign that form at the beginning of the academic year through August 31 of the following year.

She believes the move toward summer testing anticipates pressures that soon may come to bear on sports at all levels, including intercollegiate sports, as concerns build in Congress and elsewhere over the effectiveness of drug testing by organizations that govern or sponsor competition.

“We’ve heard, through the Congressional scrutiny of the past year, there remains the potential for federal legislation that would include a requirement for year-round testing in Divisions I and II,” she said. “There is a perception that a gap in testing exists.”

Uryasz said it is primarily that perception, rather than any particular results of previous drug testing or survey data, that supports extending testing into summer months.

“If you look at the newest drug-use data, steroid use is down again, and so it would be easy to say, we don’t need to make any changes,” he said. “But common sense tells us that when you give athletes 60 to 90 days without the burden of drug testing, it provides a window of opportunity that we need to close.”

Uryasz said that even when summer usage of performance-enhancing drugs ends before the school year begins, its benefits extend into the competitive season.

Closing that “window of opportunity” —and protecting student-athletes’ health and safety, an ongoing goal that “does not go away in the summer” — ultimately trumps concerns about burdens that summer testing may impose on student-athletes and institutional personnel, he believes.

“It’s basically a balancing of the need by the NCAA to make sure that athletes aren’t gaining a competitive advantage from time off during the summer — and to support student-athlete well-being — against what are burdens not only administratively on site coordinators, but to a certain extent on the athlete,” Uryasz said.

He added that the scope of this summer’s program should keep that burden at a minimum.

“We hope it won’t be an administrative burden on the site coordinators,” he said. “We’re going to keep the numbers small at each institution — for example, when we go on campus (during the school year), we test 18 football players. In the summer, we won’t test that many at any one campus, so it won’t be as much of a burden on the site coordinator to find them.”

Finding student-athletes

Summer site coordinators basically will have the same responsibilities as campus personnel who coordinate drug testing during the academic year, including working with the compliance office to maintain up-to-date squad lists, said Andrea Wickerham, Drug Free Sport’s NCAA drug-testing program director.

“The biggest difference will be keeping summer contact information for all student-athletes in all sports,” Wickerham said. “They’ll need to know, if student-athletes are on campus, then where are they — reachable by cell phone, or in a residence hall? For those kids who are gone for the summer, where are they?”

As during other times of the year, Drug Free Sport will work through coordinators to select and notify student-athletes and conduct testing within a 48-hour period. To help schedule testing at times when student-athletes are most likely to be on or near campuses, Wickerham said site coordinators will be asked to provide summer institutional academic calendars for planning use.

“We hope most students we select will be on campus,” she said. “So we want to make sure that if they’re on campus and going to school that we’re getting them at the right time.

“We also realize there may be student-athletes who will be on campus or in the community but may not be going to school. Ideally, we’ll be able to do morning drug testing, as we normally do, but we’ll be flexible in timing — if kids are working, say they have a 7 a.m. job, we may have to do an afternoon or evening test. So we’ll need to know, and site coordinators will need to know, those particulars.”

Wickerham conceded the biggest challenge may arise in what she hopes will be only a relatively few instances where selected student-athletes are away from campus — for example, those who return home for vacation or to work, or who play in a summer baseball league.

“We’ll need contact information for those student-athletes from the site coordinator, and then we’ll do our best to get a collector to that student as soon as we can.” In those situations, site coordinators typically will be asked to contact student-athletes and alert them to expect a telephone call from a drug-testing crew chief, who then will make arrangements to conduct testing wherever the student-athlete may be located.

Worth the burden

Because this is the first time Drug Free Sport has faced the likelihood of testing student-athletes away from campus, Wickerham assumes there will be unanticipated logistical issues that everyone involved will work through as best they can.

“We’ll just have to live through it and see what happens,” she said.

However, the burdens of testing should be worthwhile, Wickerham and others believe — not just because summer testing poses a threat to those who might be inclined to cheat, but perhaps more importantly because it helps relieve student-athletes of pressure to cheat.

“We’re going to get the word out that drug testing is going to happen this summer,” she said. “We want institutions to educate student-athletes about summer drug testing, and we are asking administrators, athletic trainers and coaches to inform student-athletes that this will be a possibility.”

Wilfert says that’s the reason why the competitive-safeguards committee authorized the summer program.

“We’re trying to continue to provide as high a degree of deterrence as we can — to deter some from cheating, while helping relieve those who don’t want to cheat but may feel pressured to do so,” she said.