Division II championships will operate beginning this fall under new standards designed to minimize the likelihood that teams will compete with ineligible student-athletes.

The principal change involves the implementation of a "nullification" system for adjusting championships selection criteria for teams that used ineligible student-athletes. The new approach also establishes preventative measures, along with a system of fines and other penalties, for teams found to be in violation.

The nullification system replaces the previous approach in which committees were required to evaluate the material contribution that ineligible student-athletes had made to their team’s success.

The new nullification approach deducts a predetermined value to any contest in which an ineligible student-athlete competes. The penalty is applied in two ways — to the team’s win-loss percentage and to the strength-of-season index (overall and in-region, if applicable). Each sports committee established its own values based a calculation that would lower a team’s regional ranking by about one spot for each nullification deduction. The value of the nullification is consistent across all sports, although the actual figures differ from sport to sport because of variations in the number of games played and the number of institutions sponsoring each sport.

The new system does not evaluate the effect that the ineligible student-athlete had on the outcome of a contest. In other words, the nullification effect of an ineligible basketball player who played one minute and did not score would be the same as for a player who played all 40 minutes and scored 20 points.

In team sports, if a team’s win-loss percentage falls below .500 after the adjustments, it will not be eligible for championships selection. Similarly, a conference will lose earned-access privileges if nullification penalties drop all conference teams out of the top 10 in regional rankings.

For individual sports (for example, swimming), if a student-athlete achieves the qualifying standard while ineligible, that individual would not be eligible for the cham-
pionship. For individual-team sports such as golf, if the student-athlete competed while ineligible, the student-athlete’s score would be deleted from the team score. In the case of golf, where teams use five players and count four scores, the fifth score would be calculated into the team score.

Other elements of the plan

While the nullification procedure creates an adjustment mechanism for teams that have used ineligible student-athletes, the new approach to championships eligibility also emphasizes prevention. Beginning this fall, every Division II athletics director will be required to sign a form stating that student-athletes who were certified at the beginning of the year continue to be eligible.

"It was not designed to be a lot of work," said David Riggins, the athletics director at Mars Hill College who chaired the Championships Eligibility Project Team. "It was just designed to give us one last thought process for each member institution so that we make absolutely sure that we’ve certified all of these student-athletes correctly.

"Some institutions may feel the need to come back and recertify every single student-athlete, but we just did a quick inventory, making sure that nobody’s eligibility status has been damaged since the school year started. The biggest hurdle is to make sure that nobody’s dropped a class and you’ve missed it and all of a sudden they’re below full-time enrollment and they have become ineligible."

The final part of the new championships-eligibility plan involves financial penalties for institutions that use ineligible student-athletes.

A financial penalty of $250 per ineligible student-athlete will be imposed for violations that should have been avoided, up to a maximum of $2,500. Fines will be imposed for all contests in which ineligible student-athletes participate.

Fines will not be necessarily be assessed in all situations. For example, if administrators did not know that a student-athlete was ineligible and had no reason to know, then the program would suffer no financial penalty. However, the nullification penalty still would be applied since an ineligible student-athlete participated.

"I guess money is one component," Riggins said, "but the real value is that the penalty creates a discussion about how this problem happened and how we can prevent it in the future."