National Collegiate Athletic Association
NCAA News Archive - 2010
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The NCAA News
ATLANTA – While dozens of compliance personnel figure to be cruising the halls at this year's NCAA Convention to get up to speed on legislative changes, five months from now they'll be joining colleagues at their own annual meeting to press the accelerator on a function that has moved into the intercollegiate athletics fast lane.
The 400-member National Association for Athletics Compliance, which has been under the umbrella of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics since 1998, will hold its third membership gathering in conjunction with the NACDA convention in Anaheim, California, June 21-22.
What members can expect is increased attention to leadership as the function they perform gains notoriety on college and university campuses.
"Leadership and trust are key components in the value set of the day-to-day compliance professional," said Dan Bartholomae, an assistant AD at Pittsburgh and a member of the NAAC board of directors. "It is important to have an organization, consisting of those day-to-day professionals, that can inspire and develop those values."
Accordingly, the NAAC, which has grown its membership 26 percent from last year alone, is providing its members more resources to succeed. Among those is a new Web site called NAACConnect, which allows members to share ideas, upload documents and discuss compliance topics and legislative proposals.
"The main benefit is the membership forum in which compliance personnel can post questions, get answers and bounce ideas off each other, sort of like a message board," said board member Josh Snyder from Iowa State.
But the NAAC convention also will urge members to focus more on the leadership aspect of the compliance profession.
"The lessons you learn in compliance can propel your own career but also propel the athletics department as a whole," Bartholomae said, noting that more young people are seeking to progress in athletics administration via the compliance entry point. "ADs are on the hot seat and make quick decisions that will impact a broad base of constituents every day. We as compliance people have been doing that since we were interns, so a compliance skill set translates well into leadership roles."
In that way, Bartholomae added, it's also important that the NAAC convention intertwines with NACDA's, since it offers a networking opportunity for compliance personnel and ADs.
The NAAC also provides a collective, national voice for compliance personnel. Most of the issues the NCAA deals with in one way or another affect compliance people, Bartholomae said, since they interact with every aspect of athletics.
"There aren't too many people who interact with more athletics people than compliance," said Northern Illinois Senior Associate AD Christian Spears, NAAC's third vice president. "We meet regularly with every sport and department, senior administration, campus departments – you name it.
"For a while, the profession was pigeon-holed as an administrative, pick-up-the-book-and-give-me-the-facts kind of role. That's not what it is, though. How many people pick up the phone and call the head coach directly? Not many, but the compliance person does."
Thus, the national organization for compliance is growing just as fast as its members' responsibilities are on the campuses they serve. And with that growth comes a comfort in numbers.
"Having a network of compliance professionals you can reach is invaluable," Bartholomae said. "The NCAA national office staff and our conference office contacts are valuable day-to-day resources for our profession, but there is also a great benefit in having a network of on-campus professionals who just one week ago may have encountered the same on-campus challenge that you are facing today. That's valuable, especially for people new to the profession.
"Accordingly, the NAAC will look to offer a lot of mentoring opportunities at this year's convention, and will continue to build a network of strong and reliable compliance professionals that can benefit the profession and the industry as a whole."
For more on the NAAC, see: