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Women’s basketball recruiting rules to change, 
COI members appointed

By Michelle Brutlag Hosick
NCAA.org

Division I women’s basketball coaches will be recruiting student-athletes under a new set of rules in the future.

The Board of Directors on Saturday adopted a new recruiting model that includes changes in rules governing communication with prospects, off-campus contacts, official visits, on-campus evaluations and the creation of a summer academic access model.

The new model:

• Eliminates all restrictions on modes of communication beginning Sept. 1 before the junior year in high school. It also will allow communication with recruits and off-campus contacts to begin at that time.
• Adds a weekend of evaluation at a certified nonscholastic event in April and prohibits the evaluation period from falling on Easter weekend.
• Moves the start date for the September contact period a week earlier.
• Confines off-campus contacts during the junior year only at the prospect’s educational institution or residence.
• Allows recruiting opportunities with juniors and seniors to be either contacts or evaluations, but prohibits contacts while classes are in session or the day of an athletics competition for the prospect.
• Allows official visits beginning the Thursday after the national championship game of the prospect’s junior year. Official visits are permitted during the summer, but not during dead or July evaluation periods. Schools are allowed to pay for travel expenses for the student-athlete and two parents or legal guardians.
• Allows tryouts.
• Creates a summer-access model that requires enrollment in summer school or a certain level of academic achievement in order for student-athletes to participate in eight hours per week of weight training, conditioning and skill instruction (two-hour limit on skill instruction) for an eight-week period in the summer. An institution’s summer school schedule dictates access (for example, a six-week summer school session would permit participation in athletics activities for six weeks), unless the student-athlete achieves academic benchmarks.

The summer access and tryouts pieces are effective immediately. The remainder will be effective Aug. 1.

In other business, the Board also voted to allow former NCAA coaches to serve on the Division I Committee on Infractions within 10 years of their employment at an NCAA institution. Originally, coaches had to be within three years of their employment to serve on the committee, but the pool of candidates who meet the three-year limitation was small.

The Board also appointed a group of people to the expanded Committee on Infractions as a first step toward a larger, more representative group. The appointments bring the total of members to 18, with the goal of 24 members that will work in panel groups to help accelerate the process. Appointed to the committee were:

• Sankar Suryanarayan, university counsel at Princeton
• Michael Adams, president of Georgia
• Carol Cartwright, former president at Bowling Green State
• Joel Maturi, former athletics director at Minnesota
• Lloyd Carr, former head football coach, Michigan
• Bobby Cremins, former head men’s basketball coach at College of Charleston and Georgia Tech
• Norman Bay, director of enforcement, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and former law faculty at New Mexico
• Thomas Hill, senior vice president for student affairs at Iowa State

The new members begin their terms Aug. 1.