Members of the Division II Student-Athlete Advisory Committee recently were surveyed to ascertain their perspectives on the importance of their involvement in the NCAA's governance and decision-making process. Three of their statements were so poignant that they were chosen to demonstrate the relevance of involving student-athletes in the NCAA. Listen to their voices.
One student said, "First and foremost, without student-athletes, there is no NCAA -- period. The NCAA is providing a service to member institutions, but it also acts on behalf of student-athlete welfare, and student-athlete input as to what constitutes 'welfare' is very important."
Another student said, "One of the biggest benefits of being involved in the NCAA is understanding how collegiate athletics operates from the inside out. Many student-athletes look at the NCAA as a big organization that polices sports. The only time they hear about the NCAA is when the infractions committee puts someone on probation. Through my involvement, I have gained a great deal of respect for the governance structure and how it operates."
Another student highlighted the importance of knowledge in empowering students to think, analyze, take action and gain self-confidence: "I think it is important for student-athletes to know what is happening to them and why. I see so many (who) don't even know what the NCAA is and I find that sad. Being part of the SAAC has made me think a little harder, has given me some responsibilities that otherwise I wouldn't have experienced, and I feel a little better about myself and my abilities for when I graduate."
These voices echo those of many student-athletes who are dedicated to their chosen sports and who superimpose on their demanding academic schedules, practice time and competitive performances. Some student-athletes also devote time to leadership on their campuses, in their conferences and on the national scene.
Beyond their participation on campus, one might wonder why it is so important to address student-athletes' involvement in the NCAA. Is it because of the considerable fiscal investment of the NCAA in the SAAC? Is it because the NCAA understands its unique
capacity to augment the overall academic experience of student-athletes through the organizational mechanism provided by the SAAC? Or is it because it is politically correct and expedient to involve students? Is it probable that the NCAA realizes the value of enhancing its governance by assuring input from the very population that provides its raison d'etre? Does the NCAA value its responsibility to foster student-athletes' leadership development? Does the NCAA genuinely believe that students should become involved in shaping their destiny and thereby become more informed and empowered? Does the NCAA believe that today's student-athletes should become engaged in shaping future student-athletes' involvement and influence in the strategic directions of the NCAA? Perhaps there is a modicum of truth in all of the above.
The NCAA is a very complex and multidimensional organization that attempts to bring almost 1,000 member institutions (public and private) under one rubric to establish policies, set standards, guidelines and operating procedures, and monitor compliance. One student respondent in the SAAC survey commented that the NCAA culture is so dynamic that it requires continual student involvement.
When the NCAA enacted legislation in 1989 to create the Association-wide SAAC, the charge to the committee was to review legislation and issues under consideration by the Councils and various committees and task forces, and share their perspectives with decision-making bodies and policy shapers. The intent was to provide student-athletes an opportunity to offer opinions and forward recommendations to decision-makers. Effective in 1997, Divisions I, II and III formed independent SAACs.
Although the number of seats for student-athletes and the organizational structure for the SAAC have varied dramatically since 1989, particularly with the transformed governance, the mission has remained constant. A partial list of topics and legislation in which the SAAC has been involved follows:
Transfer policies.
This list is not exhaustive but is intended to highlight the integrity, seriousness and relevance of the duties performed by the SAAC. Clearly, the SAAC has participated in decision-making regarding substantive issues that are germane to student-athletes' welfare, needs, rights and responsibilities.
Because the NCAA is a dynamic and vital organization, members of the SAAC frequently address issues regarding future directions and implications of their involvement in governance and legislative issues. Regarding the organizational relationship of the SAAC to the overall governance and organizational structure of the NCAA, occasionally the dialogue is resurrected over whether student-athletes would be better served by being more central to decisions and governance through direct involvement vis-à-vis acquiring seats and voting power in the governance structure, or if indirect involvement through influence and liaisons to governance groups is sufficient.
The existing Divisions I and II SAACs do not have formal votes in the governance structures of the NCAA. This revelation does not infer that student-athletes' input is not valued and carefully considered by all policy-making bodies. To the contrary, serious deliberations seem to occur on all levels regarding how to incorporate the SAAC's recommendations into decision-making.
Currently, the Division II SAAC is a committee within the organization that enjoys the benefit of assigned administrative staff from the NCAA office, along with one liaison from the Presidents Council and two liaisons from the Management Council. Similar models exist for Divisions I and III. This structure offers indirect spheres of input and influence, but it does not include student representation on the formal governance structures.
Benefits for student-athletes who are involved in SAAC
Student-athletes appear to benefit from the demystification of the NCAA resulting from their close proximity to decision-making. They spend long hours in arduous deliberations and critical examination of legislative issues and the potential impact on athletes' lives. They are conscious that they represent constituencies as they carefully craft their positions and rehearse for presentations. They seek consensus to assure that a point of view will be unanimously supported when they advance a recommendation. Their goal is, very simply, to achieve excellence in their presentations and in their representation of approximately 330,000 athletes in the NCAA.
Members of the SAAC received high marks for their session at the 1999 NCAA Convention. Many attendees volunteered their observations that the session was the highlight of the Convention. SAAC members were commended for the quality of their presentations and reaffirmed of their value to the organization.
Longer-term benefits to students
There are longer-term benefits to students who become involved in NCAA leadership that they may or may not have considered. Following are some themes that emerged in the survey regarding benefits accrued to students. Many of these themes can be documented in related research on learning theory and student development.
Student involvement in learning: Students who become involved in their learning, persist in on-time graduation, adjust more easily in college and in post-college life, and bond meaningfully to their friends and to their college or university.
Special leadership training: SAAC members gain special leadership training, didactically, vicariously and experientially. They attend leadership conferences and summits sponsored by the NCAA and designed especially for them, practice and acquire skills individually and in groups, listen to speakers and learn how to prepare, present and defend their points-of-view to seasoned professionals within the organization.
The NCAA learning laboratory: The NCAA is an active learning laboratory for students in the SAAC. They are always encouraged to be the best they can possibly be, to take risks and to view themselves as learners. SAAC members have readily available to them advice, counsel and observations from senior-level professionals from various institutions. They understand that they may accept or reject advice without judgment and admonition.
Networking: Student-athletes build strong national networks with the NCAA staff, the Presidents Councils, the Management Councils, the Board of Directors, the Executive Committee, NCAA coaches, faculty athletics representatives and their peer athletics companions. These networks form permanent links to enable students to be informally assessed, groomed and recommended for future opportunities based upon demonstrated abilities.
Career development: Enhanced career development opportunities accrue to SAAC members who seek future employment and graduate studies.
Mentoring and tutoring: The SAAC members receive mentoring from experienced professionals within the NCAA; conversely, SAAC members serve as tutors and peer mentors to one another.
Service learning: Internally, the SAAC members participate in service learning by targeting community projects located in cities where their meetings are scheduled.
Ethical and moral development: Perhaps one of the greatest learning outcomes for members of the SAAC relates to the opportunity to begin to test and enhance their ethical and moral principles. Case examples of questions of moral and ethical deliberations follow: When athletes knowingly violate the codes and principles of compliance designated by the NCAA, should they hope not to be discovered or should they self-report? What sanctions should they endure? Is it fair for international amateurs who may have advantages over traditional college students to be permitted to participate as NCAA athletes even when their participation may guarantee a winning team, bowl games and tournament advantages for the university? Over and over, student-athletes must examine the issues of right, wrong and personal responsibility.
Community building for campuses: When student-athletes perform, they have a unique capacity for building a sense of community on campus and with the external community. Nothing can attract as much excitement and galvanize these two communities more than witnessing model student-athletes who are scholars and winners. Generally, universities are eager to build a sense of community on campus. Strong NCAA programs are merely one example of how campuses can improve the quality of life and institutional esprit de corps through athletics activities.
Summary and conclusions
Clearly, the SAAC has offered and continues to promulgate involvement opportunities for student-athletes to enable, encourage and groom them to expand their college experiences beyond those ordinarily associated with the classroom. Students' involvement in nonacademic experiences is intended to be an additive in college and university life. If student-athletes honor the discipline and persistence codes of the NCAA that are designed to enable them to balance academic and athletics excellence and to execute standards of ethics, their futures will be significantly enhanced.
Efforts should be made to bridge the gap in education between the "two A's": academics and athletics. Given certain stereotypes of athletes in academic institutions, there is a need to determine the value and relevance of athletics to academic institutions, to alumni/ae, to students, and to the external communities. There also is a need for strategic initiatives to engender faculty support of athletics based upon ties to the academic mission. It thus becomes important to describe what the SAAC contributes symbolically, intellectually and functionally to students' academic experience.
Institutions must exercise diligence, integrity and accountability to offer student-athletes the important value-added dimensions to college life that athletics can provide. This after all epitomizes the purposes for which intercollegiate athletics were originally intended on college and university campuses and signals the intent of administration to encourage educational excellence for students who choose the venue of athletics involvement to round out their college experiences.
Marvalene Hughes is president of California State University, Stanislaus, and is a member of the NCAA Division II Presidents Council. The author is grateful to Troy Arthur, NCAA membership services representative, and Lori A. Hendricks, NCAA education outreach program coordinator, for their compilation of the background materials.
Comment -- Zero-sum pursuit leads to empty result
BY GARY R. ROBERTS
TULANE UNIVERSITY
It is almost religious dogma in college athletics today that we need to make more money.
The article in the June 7 issue of The NCAA News by Sheldon Steinbach, arguing that it is important that federal tax laws favorably treat donations made to obtain priority luxury box seating, is founded on this premise. So is the Bowl Championship Series arrangement and many other policies relating to trademark licensing, television contracts, eligibility, and the like that seem to drive our "amateur" athletics enterprise.
But this is a faulty premise that all of us need to understand and reevaluate.
Making more money will not solve our problems and is really not all that important for our ability to achieve the true goals of intercollegiate athletics.
The fact is that no matter how much revenue we generate, it will never be enough. This is so because of the nature of athletics -- namely, that it is inherently a zero-sum game. For every winner, there must be a loser (or in some sports many losers), and in every conference or NCAA division only one team can win the championship while everyone else fails to achieve its ultimate objective. Thus every NCAA athletics program continually is driven to improve its competitive situation vis-à-vis the other schools in its conference and division.
Among the ways to improve that competitive position is to hire more and better coaches by paying higher salaries, improve facilities, recruit more widely and aggressively, provide athletes with more comforts and benefits (whether permitted under NCAA rules or not), etc. All of these things cost money, and thus every school is inherently always under pressure to increase its revenues in order to improve its competitive position. This has put intercollegiate athletics into the regrettable position of being hopelessly caught in an uncontrollable upward-spiraling financial arms race that can never be won. Everyone has to stay ahead of the Joneses, but there are always some Joneses ahead of them. No matter how much money every program has, every team cannot win the championship.
Like the dog hopelessly chasing its tail, every school continually struggles to enhance athletics revenues, but since inevitably all but a few schools at any given time will be outspent by others who are at the top of the heap, almost everyone always feels enormous pressure to increase revenues. And because everyone always needs more revenue, we place enormous priority on that pursuit, relegating other fundamentally important and more basic objectives to being compromised or placed on the back burner.
The result of this is that we have improperly ordered our priorities, perverted and compromised our fundamental values, and lost sight of the fact that our programs are supposed to be extracurricular activities that exist for the educational benefit of real students who take advantage of the athletics opportunities we offer to them -- all to keep making more money that in the end can never be enough. And when the pursuit of more money is given top priority for too long, we forget why we are here in the first place and making more money becomes the end objective in itself.
Our enterprise has become almost totally driven by business people and administrators, not educators (with faculty representatives now largely relegated to clerical and peripheral tasks that make them little more than window dressing). We, of course, still pay lip service to protecting the interests of the student-athlete (that's how we justify our existence and structure), but in fact those interests are only protected when they don't interfere with athletics success and the revenues that go with it.
If tomorrow every school could double their athletics budgets, the pressure to generate more and more revenues would not abate in the least. In fact, it would probably increase even more. Oh, our coaches and administrators would get enormous salary increases, recruiting budgets would soar, facilities would become palatial, and a few new teams might be added (especially in women's sports), but inevitably, when the dust settled only a few schools would by definition be at the top competitively, and all those who aspire to be better would still need to generate even more revenues in order to try to catch them. And the few at the top would still need to develop more revenues to stay ahead of those they know are doggedly chasing them.
I do not have any simple solution to this problem. It is one that inevitably arises from when industry that exists to promote and reflect one set of noncommercial values becomes in fact driven almost entirely by the values of commercialism and economic competition.
Schizophrenia is not easy to cure. The courts in their infinite lack of wisdom have created limits on our ability to control costs meaningfully, not that we really want to anyway. (If we were serious about cost containment, we would have capped the salaries of the head coaches, not the last assistants -- a fact that did not escape the courts' notice.)
The surest way to remain pure to our mission would be to adopt a rule banning any athletics team from appearing on television or charging any but nominal admission to athletics events, thus forcing institutions of higher learning to fund athletics teams the same way they fund every other student activity and leaving coaches to do what they are supposed to do -- educate young people. But no one seriously expects us to perform such radical surgery on ourselves.
Another solution would be for all or most athletics revenues at every NCAA school to be pooled and divided evenly among all the members of each division, thereby eliminating the financial incentive to win at all costs and to try to outdo everyone else in raising revenues, but again I suspect that schools currently in the catbird seat (that is, those in the major conferences) would block such a sensible and reasonable cure for their own malady.
But even though there appears to be no politically viable antidote to this uncontrollable financial arms race, it would at least be useful for us all to recognize the futility of focusing so much of our energy and so greatly compromising our integrity in the endless pursuit of more and more revenue when no matter how much money we all have, it can never be enough.
Gary R. Roberts is the faculty athletics representative at Tulane University.
Opinions -- Players deserve quality advice before making draft decision
David Falk, sports agent
Atlanta Journal
"The players are getting such poor advice. We all watched (high-school player) Rashard Lewis sit at the draft last year and cry as he slid into the second round ... I doubt anyone advised him he'd go in the second round. Or Al Harrington, who went 25th to Indiana. Had he gone to school for one year he probably would have been top 10 this year. That decision might cost him $5 million to $10 million (over his career).
"Sadly, we need more disasters because no one wants to acknowledge that advising players is a specialized business.
"You need disasters to warn players this is a very serious business."
College athletics
Mike Sullivan, columnist
Columbus Dispatch
"There is not enough ballistic capability in the Pentagon's arsenal to stem the advance of commentators, columnists and assorted moralists gathering to march yet another time on the citadel of college athletics.
"Even a false breath of scandal, like the recent fuss growing from Andy Katzenmoyer's summer school adventures at Ohio State, is enough to summon troops who mill about restlessly at the campfires.
"Then comes a Minnesota. Or, some years back, a Kentucky, where a future teammate sat in for a prime recruit's entrance test. Or a Creighton, where an upperclassman somehow attained the mutually exclusive states of being eligible and illiterate.
"The time has come for hyperbole: 'These are professional satellite leagues. These are flesh-peddling sports entertainment factories. These are blah, gar-rumph, hoo-hah!' (At this point, look for telltale signs of bulging retinas and drool on the chin.)
"Caricature comes marching in behind the first wave. Brace yourself for references to mascot (Gopher), race (African-American), exploitation (slave plantations), mercenaries (players), talent leeches (summer camp directors, recruiters) and fat cats (university boosters).
"This outpouring may strike you as suspiciously facile. Especially when it leads almost seamlessly to a 'solution' that some columnist, somewhere, rolls off his cuff at least once a year:
"Stop the charade! Don't call them student-athletes! Admit that it's a semi-pro operation! Make classroom attendance voluntary!'
"Of course. How could we have missed it? Hey, Fred, let's tailgate every Saturday when Our Vocational Trainees take on Their Vocational Trainees.
"Unfortunately, it's not enough to beware of solutions that seem too easy.
"Beware, especially, of the dripping brush that paints all too broadly.
"As an ideal, amateur athletics is a maddeningly fragile vessel.
"Every violation of its theoretical purity -- whether in material benefits or classroom cheating -- traces to individuals acting without integrity.
"But it doesn't invalidate student-athletes -- even superstars -- who work to make their grades, or academic counselors who perform with honesty and dedication, or coaches who try to do the right thing.
"This group exists. It is not even a minority.
"It deserves better than Minnesota. But it also deserves better than a volley of cheap shots, fired from a spray gun."
BY MARVALENE HUGHES