The Division I Championships/Competition Cabinet heard from Beth Bass, the chief executive officer of the Women's Basketball Coaches Association (WBCA), and Jim Haney, the executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC), about a package of recruiting and access proposals during the cabinet's February 1-2 meeting in Indianapolis.

NCAA President Myles Brand invited the NABC and WBCA last year to submit comprehensive proposed legislation regarding those issues to improve student-athlete well-being and the culture of the sport.

Several significant proposals in the NABC package were defeated by the Division I Management Council during its January meeting until members reconsidered the measures later in the meeting and agreed to send them out for membership comment. The Council and Board of Directors will give their final votes in April.

Haney presented the cabinet with a revised package of the proposals that pared down some of the recommendations. For example, he said, the NABC no longer supports Proposal No. 04-110-A because it mirrors Proposal No. 03-83, which would address access issues and treat student-athletes enrolled at an institution and receiving athletics aid during the summer before their initial full-time enrollment the same as returning student-athletes.

The NABC also withdrew support for Proposal Nos. 04-112-B, 04-115-A and 04-119-A.

The intent of Proposal No. 04-112-B specifies that for all sports, participation in preseason exhibition contests or informal practice scrimmages would not result in the loss of a season of competition. However, the NABC still supports Proposal No. 04-112-D, which states that only during the initial year of enrollment may a student-athlete participate in preseason exhibition games or informal practice scrimmages without losing a season of competition.

Proposal No. 04-115-A specifies that men's basketball student-athletes can engage in a maximum of eight hours of countable athletically related activities per week outside the playing season (including the summer vacation period), with not more than two of those hours devoted to individual or team skill related instruction. The NABC is putting its support behind 04-115-B, which would restrict the out-of-season activities specifically to the academic year and not during official vacation periods. No such athletics activities would be permitted a week before final exams outside the playing season.

The NABC also no longer supports Proposal No. 04-119-A, which would establish a flexible recruiting calendar and permit an institution to conduct one on-campus tryout for each men's basketball prospect. The NABC now supports No. 04-119-B, which also increases the flexibility of the recruiting calendar and now recommends an amendment to increase the number of person days from 120 to 130 days. It also reinstates the April contact period (but does not reinstate junior contacts) to compensate for the elimination of the proposed tryout.

Haney reiterated why coaches deem this package of proposals on recruiting and access as important steps in improving the culture of men's basketball.

"They all relate to graduation," Haney said. "We need to enhance the frequency of graduation in our sport. We wanted to address the issue of retention and the frequency of student-athletes in our sport transferring to other schools."

Cabinet members raised some of the same concerns that Management Council members did last month when they struggled to move the proposals into the comment period. Some questioned the integrity of Proposal No. 116, for example, which would allow a coach to watch student-athletes participating in voluntary, nonorganized activities such as pick-up games. No instruction would be permitted, but cabinet members wanted to know where the checks and balances would be with this proposal.

"I've already talked to our special committee (on recruiting and access), our board and our congress about this whole issue of trust," Haney said. "When we say 'watch,' it has to mean 'watch.' It cannot mean that you're going down to the court and conducting a meeting or going down there for individual instruction. We talked about our ethics committee taking responsibility in a leadership position. If someone violates this, we're going to have to come down hard on those people for undermining the whole issue of trust."

Haney said the NABC could restrict membership of violators, remove coaches from the eligible pool of candidates for coach of the year consideration or reduce their allotment of Final Four tickets. He said the NABC also could privately and publicly reprimand violating coaches.

"We wanted to find a way to bridge the gap between coaches and administrators in terms of developing grounds where we can trust one another," Haney said. "We recognize the greater burden is on the coach in terms of proving he's trustworthy."

David Berst, NCAA vice-president for Division I, said coaches and conferences already have opened lines of communication after the package struggled at the Management Council level.

"I think you will see a re-energized effort on the part of the coaches -- and the conference offices as well -- who are going to be more sophisticated on the revisions that have taken place to evaluate them on their merits," Berst said. He also told the cabinet that such communication will offer a good barometer about the package by the time the Management Council votes on the issues in April.

Women's basketball proposals

Bass told the cabinet that the WBCA recruiting and access package is based on four core principles: (1) flexibility that allows each institution to customize its recruiting plans to meet its own needs; (2) balancing access among the prospective student-athlete, the current student-athlete and coaches; (3) minimizing the impact of outside entities; and (4) empowering a scholastic environment in the prospect's academic life.

Two central proposals in the WBCA package are Nos. 04-142 and 04-146. Proposal No. 04-142 would prohibit women's basketball scholastic and nonscholastic events, practice and competition from being conducted on the the campus of a Division I institution, except for high-school state tournaments or competition related to the state tournament or official state games under specified conditions.

Proposal No. 04-146 would prohibit evaluations at nonscholastic events during the women's basketball prospective student-athlete's academic year.

"This takes the insanity out (of the recruiting process)," Bass told cabinet members. "It helps clarify some gray areas. We talk about the text messaging and the technology that exist today. You have assistant coaches feeling like they need to address the bings and bongs on their computers or BlackBerrys at 2 a.m. They feel like a hamster on a treadmill where they have to keep up with the Joneses. ... One coach told me to try and put some balance back in their personal lives as well as for the prospective student-athlete."

The cabinet suggested it would be in the best interests of each coaches association to develop a document for the membership that succinctly describes the current rules and what each proposal would change so that the proposals could be understood more easily before the April vote.

Other highlights

Division I Championships/Competition Cabinet
February 1-2/Indianapolis

• Approved a recommendation from the cabinet's bracket/format subcommittee regarding multisport conference criteria for automatic qualification into NCAA championships for sports sponsored by 50 percent or less of the total Division I membership. The recommendation allows multisport conferences that add a conference sport to receive automatic qualification, provided that the conference includes at least six active member institutions that have conducted conference competition together at the Division I level in the sport in question the preceding two years.

• Agreed to require sports committees using the Rating Percentage Index (RPI) to release both the RPI used by the committee during the selection process and the final RPI (calculated after the end of the championship, taking into account NCAA tournament games) to conferences and independent institutions as soon as possible after the end of a championship. Additionally, the cabinet reaffirmed the policy of sports committees not being allowed to release (either publicly or to the membership) any national or regional ratings, rankings or polls.

• After noting that automatic qualification is not available to one eligible conference in Division I-AA football that is sponsored by less than 60 percent of the membership but more than 10 percent, the cabinet agreed to seek feedback from the Division I-AA Football Committee and the Division I-AA members of the Collegiate Commissioners Association to determine whether changes should be made to ensure that all eligible conferences have automatic qualification into the championship.

• Reviewed information provided by the sports committees relative to how institutions currently are assigned to regions (that is, geographically or by conference affiliation), the purpose of regional assignments and the role and function of regional advisory committees. The cabinet agreed that information shall be provided to the sports committees to inform them of conference membership changes being implemented over the next couple of years. Sports committees shall determine if any adjustments need to be made to regional assignments, based on this information. The subcommittee also noted that consistent with previous practice individual institutions may request from sports committees the opportunity to be realigned from one region to another with supporting rationale for the request. A letter from the chair of the cabinet will be sent to conference commissioners informing them of this policy.

• Recommended that legislation be adopted to permit the chair of the Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports to remain on the committee for an additional year if the individual becomes the committee chair with only one year remaining on his or her four-year term.