Keeping Faith: Putting Principles Into Action

Keeping Faith with the Student-Athlete: A New Model for Intercollegiate Athletics

Download a PDF of this publication

• Letter of Transmittal
• Introduction
• Reform
• A New Model
• Putting Principles into Action
• Principles for Action
• Appendix A: Acknowledgements
• Appendix B: Meeting Particpants
• Download a PDF of this publication

Putting Principles Into Action

PRINCIPLES INTO ACTION

Reform will not be realized with calls for improvement or with recommendations that sit on a shelf. What is required is a great nationwide effort to move reform from rhetoric to reality. This campaign should be directed at putting the “one-plus-three” model into place and ridding intercollegiate athletics of abuse.

This effort must take root on individual campuses; it cannot be imposed from without. It should draw on the energy of university presidents and trustees. It should seek the counsel of athletics directors, coaches, faculty and alumni, and call forth the best that is in our studentathletes. This campaign needs the assistance of secondary school administrators and the staunch support of the NCAA. With these elements in place, college sports can be transformed.

If that is to happen, the major actors involved in intercollegiate athletics must clearly understand their roles. The Commission wishes to speak directly to each of them.

TO COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS:

Your success at the 1991 NCAA convention confirms what we believe: You are the linchpin of the reform movement. At your own institution, your efforts are critical to a sound athletics program, one that honors the integrity of both your institution and the students wearing your colors. Together with your colleagues across the nation you can assure that college athletics serve the best ideals of higher education.

This report suggests how you can make a difference on your campus. It recommends your involvement in directing your athletics conference and in strengthening the policy-making role of presidents within the NCAA. It insists that you pay greater attention to the academic and financial functioning of your athletics department. We ask that you maintain open lines of communication with your athletics director; there should be no misunderstanding about your institution’s academic and athletics goals. The burden is on you to insist that athletics reform is a matter of utmost concern in your institution’s academic principles.

TO CHAIRS OF GOVERNING BOARDS:

When you support your president in these reforms, success will be assured. If you do not, we do not know how reform can be accomplished.

The proper role of a board is policy and oversight, not management and personnel actions. The board you lead can be the conscience of the university and the strong right arm of the president. But, without your firm hand, your board can easily lose its way amidst the doubts and misgivings that attend any great undertaking. Your task is to assure unity of purpose and firmness of resolve. Your reward will be an institution secure in the knowledge that no crisis of public confidence can arise from scandal in the athletics program.

TO THE FACULTY:

You are the inheritors of a tradition stretching back through the centuries. It holds that the faculty is responsible for academic standards and protecting the curriculum.

Your first responsibility is to that inheritance. If your institution offers classes or courses of study designed largely for student-athletes, you have fallen short. You cannot remain true to the tradition you bear by permitting athletes to masquerade as students.

Your second task is to help insure that your institutional representatives to the NCAA are not confused about their purpose. The evidence presented to the Commission indicates that some faculty athletics representatives have not fulfilled their potential as guardians of the academic interest. Working with the president, you must make it clear that these faculty members attend athletics meetings to represent the academic values of the institution.

TO ATHLETICS DIRECTORS:

It is up to you to put muscle and sinew on the framework we have suggested here and to oversee its day-to-day implementation. Most of you understand the importance of what we are proposing and have already supported essential elements of our plan within the councils of the NCAA.

Your most difficult task will be to counterbalance the traditional demand for winning teams with the renewed call for integrity and the equitable treatment of all athletes. Your best guide will come not from boosters with short memories, but from your president and your institution’s trustees. Their larger vision of the university’s responsibilities and their longer memory of its achievements represent your surest standards.

Your success as a leader in athletics reform will undoubtedly be judged by your ability to transform the athletics culture on your campus. That culture must be reshaped from one in which winning is everything to one in which competition is grounded in the “one-plus-three” model.

TO COACHES:

We know that at their best coaches are educators, mentors, and loyal advocates for the institutions and for higher education. We understand that you are on the front line - forced to make career-shaping decisions under great pressure, constantly on the alert to insure that rivals do not gain an advantage over you, your program or your institution.

You and your colleagues are the adults with the greatest day-to-day contact with our studentathletes. You must make them understand that fewer than one in a hundred will ever make a living from their athletic ability. Emphasize to them the value of a college degree. Insist that the privilege of being a member of your squad carries with it the obligation of being a student in good standing. Search out every opportunity to drive home the point that your athletes’ behavior, on and off the field, is important not merely because of what it says about them. Your satisfaction will be a lifetime associated with adults who have, with your assistance, achieved their full potential.

Your most difficult challenge may be to take to heart the warning in this document that if intercollegiate sport will not police itself, others will. That is no empty threat. It is essential that you forego the temptation to cynicism and, with your colleagues throughout the coaching profession, forge a coalition for reform built around the “one-plus-three” model.

TO THE ALUMNI:

As a product of your institution, you have a critical role to play in safeguarding its reputation. University presidents, faculty members and members of governing boards come and go, but you remain.

In the marketplace, the value of your degree is based on your institution’s reputation today, not the reputation it enjoyed when you were students. You can help protect the stake you hold in that degree by insisting that the athletics program is directed along ethical lines. Through your formal participation in structures such as governing boards, alumni boards, athletics councils and local alumni clubs, you can insist that your institution holds fast to the reform model we present here.

TO STUDENT-ATHLETES:

No one has a greater stake in the outcome of the issues described here than you. With this document the Commission has placed your concerns at the heart of athletics administration. If these reforms are adopted, letters of intent will no longer bind so tightly, the initial grant-inaid offer will no longer be for only one year, and our institutions will renew their commitment to deliver educationally even if you are injured and unable to play.

You must deliver, too. University presidents, trustees, athletics directors and coaches have the power only to create the conditions under which you can reap the rewards of a university education. You must gather that harvest. We plead with you to understand that — unless you are one of the remarkably talented and very lucky — when your athletics eligibility has expired your playing days are over. Your task, even if you are one of the fortunate few, is to prepare yourself for the years and decades that stretch ahead of you beyond college. Boosters and alumni cannot do that for you. Presidents and coaches cannot create your future. You must create it yourself. The best place to do that is in the classroom, the library and the laboratory.

TO SECONDARY SCHOOL OFFICIALS:

Many of you have objected over the years to the overemphasis on athletics at the collegiate level. But the nature of the problem has, in recent years, changed. We sense that some secondary school programs now emulate the worst features of too many collegiate programs: recruiting abuses, permitting athletics to interfere with college preparation, standing by as coaches enter into shoe contracts, permitting the time demands for team travel to grow beyond reason, and pursuing television exposure and national rankings with the same passion as colleges and universities.

With this report, we are doing our very best to re-establish important values at the center of intercollegiate sport — and to restore the student-athlete to the center of our concern. We ask you to join us in this effort.

In particular, we ask you to cooperate with us in putting an end to all-star games during the academic year, and to summer camps and leagues dominated by commercial interests. These activities promote a false sense of the importance of athletics in the student’s long-term future.

We urge you to encourage high school athletes to spend as much time preparing themselves academically as they do preparing themselves athletically. We suggest that you guide them toward institutions that will put their welfare as students and their maturation as young adults ahead of their performance as athletes. We encourage you to make them aware of the importance of attending institutions that have adopted the “one-plus-three” model set forth in this report.

TO THE NATIONAL COLLEGIATE ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION:

Finally, we address the National Collegiate Athletic Association — both our colleagues in the institutions which constitute the Association and the staff which directs the organization in their name. Throughout this document we have alluded to the NCAA. We have applauded it when justified and taken it to task when appropriate.

The NCAA has many critics. Aggrieved institutions and coaches complain about it. Disappointed boosters and politicians disagree with it. Enraged editors attack it. Presidents and academics complain that its investigative techniques are unfair. Some of the members of this Commission are among the organization’s more severe critics; most of us are not. We want to make a few major points with respect to the NCAA. First, if it did not exist, higher education would have to create it, or something very much like it. It is clear that a governing, rulemaking and disciplinary body of some sort is required. This Commission cannot impose progress; major change has to grow from within and mature through governing bodies. Handcuffing the NCAA is no way to advance athletics reform.

Second, critics of the NCAA—particularly those in higher education - should be reminded that it is not some mysterious, omnipotent, external force. It is simply the creature of its own members. Colleges and universities have only themselves to blame for its shortcomings, real or imagined; the power to change the Association rests entirely within their hands.

Third, our recommendation for advancing reform through the NCAA is built on our bedrock principle of presidential control. In fact, the organization itself preaches presidential authority on campus. The activities of the Association should reflect that conviction.

Finally, with that change in place we ask that the NCAA apply itself to the task of simplifying and codifying complex NCAA rules and procedures. Any man or woman on the street should be able to understand what the NCAA does, how it works, how it makes its decisions, and, in particular, how it determines its sanctions. As it stands, not only can the average citizen not answer those questions, but very few presidents, athletics directors, coaches or studentathletes can predict what it is likely to do in any given circumstance. This situation must be addressed.