When American University volleyball coach Barry Goldberg finds a 17-year-old international recruit in her hometown, playing on the local club team, he knows he’s got to be careful recruiting her.

Just because she’s never accepted payment for playing, she might still be considered a professional under Bylaw 12 if any of her teammates are paid more than actual and necessary expenses for competition.

Goldberg thinks that’s unfair.

“A kid who is playing on her community team – a local person playing the sport she loves – ends up being a ‘professional’ even though she had no idea she was becoming a professional athlete?” Goldberg said. “I can recognize pretty quickly if you are a professional, you leave school and play a sport for money. I don’t recruit that person.”

The Division I Amateurism Cabinet recognizes Goldberg’s dilemma and hopes to do something about it.

The rule’s effects – whether intended or not – are widespread. Any coach who recruits in team sports internationally faces the same quandary. Cabinet Chair Mike Rogers, who has dubbed the phenomenon “vicarious professionalism,” said the cabinet plans to include the matter as a top priority in its review of amateurism.

“There’s a growing consensus that vicarious professionalism is unfair,” said Rogers, the faculty athletics representative at Baylor. “As a law professor in our legal system, the general rule is that each person is responsible for his own actions, and not other people’s actions. That should apply to NCAA legislation as well.”

Rogers said the rule may have evolved as members began favoring competitive-equity concerns over the best interests of student-athletes. “But that is no longer our culture,” he said. “Deregulation would be consistent with our core principle of supporting our student-athletes.”

Rogers said he has received endorsements from a variety of people at institutions across the country. The cabinet is specifically looking for input from coaches associations that deal with this issue frequently, including the basketball and volleyball communities. The group is still gathering information, but Rogers hopes to have a proposal ready for the 2009-10 legislative cycle.

“My inclination is to move forward, but our cabinet acts as a deliberative body. Minds may change in either direction,” Rogers said.

Goldberg, who appeared at an educational session about international student-athletes at the 2009 NCAA Convention, said he runs into “vicarious professionalism” fairly often. Michael Mangarelli, associate director of amateurism certification at the NCAA Eligibility Center, acknowledged the issue was one of the most difficult and time-consuming the amateurism certification staff faces.

“The legislation requires a year-by-year analysis of every team, so even if you analyzed a team the year before for a different kid, you have to do the analysis again,” Mangarelli said. “There are lots of different levels within a club team to examine. It’s time-consuming work. Most of the kids (we are looking at) are not making the team professional – it’s a teammate. Most people would agree that’s what we should be looking at – the individual prospective student-athlete, not at third-party teammates.”

Division II has been working on the same issue for more than a year with its organized-competition rule. The same concern – that prospects triggered seasons of withholding simply because they were associated with paid teammates – prompted Division II governance groups to propose changes to the rule, including new definitions of organized competition and an expanded grace period between high school graduation and college enrollment for prospects to participate in such competition.