NEWPORT BEACH, California — Technological advances in communication can be useful, but they also can be a nuisance for prospective student-athletes and coaches.

The Division I Academics/Eligibility/Compliance Cabinet, which met February 15-17, has become increasingly aware of the problem and now wants to explore the merits of text messaging in the recruiting process.

Currently, text messaging is allowed as general correspondence. While the technology does not really provide for in-depth dialogue between two parties, a number of brief messages such as “How’d the game go?” or “How are you?” add up and can become a well-being issue for student-athletes and a quality-of-life concern for coaches.

Cabinet members will talk with the Collegiate Commissioners Association Compliance Administrators and the Division I Student-Athlete Advisory Committee about whether text messaging has grown out of control.

The cabinet wants feedback on the following options:

• Continue to regulate text messaging as a permissible correspondence.
• Eliminate text messaging from the recruiting process.
• Regulate text messaging with specified conditions, such as once per day.

“This is something we didn’t want to act too hastily on without more information,” said Shane Lyons, the chair of the cabinet’s recruiting subcommittee. “We want this to go back to the conferences for comment. One thing we discussed was the intrusiveness of text messaging. We think it is, but maybe the prospects do not.”

This issue has become a hot topic throughout the membership, thanks to some high-profiled thoughts on the practice. In January, for example, two highly touted prospects noted their concerns with the technology at the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics Summit on the Collegiate Athlete Experience. Myron Rolle, a football student-athlete who enrolled at Florida State University in January, and Scottie Reynolds, a prospective basketball student-athlete headed to the University of Oklahoma, described their recruitment as intense and overwhelming, in part because of the number of text messages each received.

Rolle’s father, Whitney, said he even received text messages from coaches who were trying to convince his son to attend a particular institution.

The San Jose Mercury News also ran an article in December citing a prospective basketball student-athlete who received a text message around bedtime. He assumed it was from his girlfriend and replied, “I love you. Good night.” The only problem was that it was sent to a college coach, who was making contact for recruiting purposes.

It leads to the question: How much contact should be allowed before it is considered invasive?

“One of the stories I heard was someone was trying to talk to their parents on the phone, and they got four text messages in a row from a coach,” said Lani Gholston, the SAAC representative on the recruiting subcommittee. “If I’m online talking to my mom and dad, I can block everyone else off my instant messaging list. With a computer you have a little more freedom. You can control the situation. I don’t think you can block text messages from your phone.”

 Another impact on the prospect is the cost of receiving so many text messages. Depending on the type of cell phone plan a person has, text messaging can add to the monthly bill.

From the coach’s perspective, recruiters feel obligated to correspond through text messaging because they know their peers are doing it. If they don’t respond to a text message, will the prospect take that as a sign of indifference? This adds to the pressure of being in the profession.

It also is a must for institutions that may not have as many recruiting resources as their competitors.

“Our coaches have to send five text messages to someone else’s one,” said cabinet member Kim Whitestone, a senior associate athletics director at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. “The reality is our coaches are working their fannies off to get on the radar screen of somebody you may get once every five years. Texting has allowed our coaches to get involved with kids we may not have gotten involved with just because there is constant interaction. I’m not saying it is right or wrong, and I understand the intrusiveness issue. I don’t like that, but it’s the reality of the game.”

But it leads to philosophical questions, cabinet members say.

“Do we need coaches talking to kids every single day or contacting them every single day?” said cabinet member Petrina Long. “Is that what we want to encourage?”

The cabinet hopes its request for feedback will answer those questions.

Other actions

The cabinet also asked the Division I Management Council to sponsor emergency legislation to permit basketball prospects to accept travel, room and board expenses from a professional sports organization’s pre-draft basketball camp.

Currently, prospective student-athletes can accept expenses for being in a pre-draft camp up to 48 hours, but most of the camps last four days.

Dave Maggard, the chair of the subcommittee on agents and amateurism, said such legislation would render waivers in those instances unnecessary.

Cabinet members also heard from Sandy Meyer, president of the National Association of Academic Advisors for Athletics, who provided results of a survey designed to determine the effects of academic reform on the organization’s membership. She said of the 132 respondents, 72 percent said their academic support unit did not receive more dollars to help programming.

The survey also probed whether the implementation of the Academic Progress Rate affected the amount of hours academic advisors spent on their jobs. Almost 15 percent said they work one to five hours more per week; 11.4 percent said they work five to 10 hours more per week; and 4.5 percent work more than 10 hours more per week because of the APR.

Almost 40 percent also said they have more on-the-job stress since the reform package was implemented.

“When this legislation was being discussed and formulated, academic advisors didn’t have any input,” Meyer said. “The only input we ever had is through our faculty athletics representatives, but that doesn’t always get through. We’ve never had an academic advisor for student-athletes on the continuing-eligibility committee. We think it would help, because you would have someone who is in the trenches and works with the kids daily.”

The survey also pointed out that one of the positive impacts of academic reform on student-athletes is that it helps them get on the right track immediately with class work, major search and career path. A negative impact cited is student-athletes are under more academic pressure without a break in time demands for their sport.

Other highlights

Division I Academics/Eligibility/Compliance Cabinet

February 15-17/Newport Beach, California

Heard an update on the progress of the NCAA Initial-Eligibility Trends Working Group that was appointed to review and make recommendations on ways to prevent students from completing secondary education at “diploma mills.”

• The subcommittee on financial aid discussed the impact of Proposal Nos. 2003-24 and 04-24-1 regarding football student-athletes who are in their final year of eligibility. No action was taken at this meeting, but the subcommittee discussed the concept of allowing institutional discretion to award athletics aid on a term-by-term basis during the student-athlete’s final year of eligibility or when the student-athlete has exhausted his eligibility.
• The recruiting subcommittee discussed the types of recruiting materials institutions are sending as hard copy to student-athletes. At the heart of the discussion are items such as institutional note cards that can be sent to a prospect before and after they sign a letter of intent.
• The cabinet’s ad hoc governance group continued to review  legislative concepts endorsed by the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics. The group agreed to seek additional feedback from the Faculty Athletics Representatives Association and the Division I FAR group before making final recommendations to the full cabinet in June.