November 14, 2008

After Long Battle, NCAA Publishes Guidelines to Protect Pregnant Athletes

It took a firestorm of negative media coverage and many years of needling, but the National Collegiate Athletic Association has finally suggested some guidelines for protecting pregnant athletes.

The guidelines, approved by the NCAA’s Division I Board of Directors in January, ensure that pregnant athletes do not lose their scholarships for one year.

Over the next few days, the NCAA plans to notify athletics departments about a new Web site and other materials they can share with female athletes about the risks of becoming pregnant and how to avoid medical complications of pregnancy while playing.

The guidelines recommend that NCAA institutions add such information to their student-athlete handbooks, but do not require it. In other words, there are no consequences for failure to share the information.

Elizabeth Sorensen, a nursing professor at Wright State University who pressured the NCAA to develop the guidelines and later helped write them, is grateful for the “huge first step.” But she says the NCAA didn’t go far enough.

“I think it will take five more years (if ever) before we actually see a cultural change toward viewing college-athlete pregnancy as a health event, not a moral event, and before athletes actually feel comfortable stepping forward and asking for help,” she wrote in an e-mail message. “I’d like to see the NCAA make direct efforts to reach out to student-athletes, not just their schools, with this knowledge.” —Brad Wolverton

November 13, 2008

UNC-Charlotte Board Votes Yes on Football

College football is coming to Charlotte, N.C.

The Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte voted unanimously today in favor of bringing a Division I-AA football program to the university in 2013, The Charlotte Observer reported.

This morning’s 8-to-0 vote comes two months after the university’s chancellor, Philip L. Dubois, announced he would support a Division I-AA football program at the university.

Now the hard work begins. The university must raise $45.3-million to get the program up and running, and Mr. Dubois has charged the athletics department with raising most of the sum. “Those who say they want football are going to have to help pay for football,” Mr. Dubois said in September.

Despite an outpouring of support from alumni and others in the Charlotte region who are eager for football, the climb will be steep for university fund raisers: The recent failure of the Charlotte-based Wachovia Corporation represents not just a blow to the regional economy but also the loss of one of the university’s major corporate donors. —Libby Sander

November 12, 2008

Black Coaches' Group Retains Lawyer to Fight Dearth of Minority Hiring in Football

The Black Coaches and Administrators organization turned up the heat on colleges today in an effort to increase minority hiring in big-time football programs.

During a news conference, the group introduced an employment lawyer who will be available to provide free advice to job candidates, opening legal routes to fight the dearth of minority candidates chosen as head coaches.

Only four minority candidates were hired as head coaches of college-football programs out of 31 searches in the 2007-8 hiring cycle, the coaches’ group said today in its fifth annual report on hiring in college sports.

“In order for us to resolve this issue, we’re leaving nothing unturned,” said Floyd A. Keith, executive director of the coaches’ group. “I think that we’ve tried, and we’ve tried for five years to bring a transparency to searches. What we’re disappointed with is we’re not in the end zone and we’re not getting enough head coaches hired when we should.”

The NCAA “can and will continue to call for athletic directors” to hire more available minority football coaches, said Charlotte F. Westerhaus, the NCAA’s vice president for diversity and inclusion. While some institutions have made progress, “interviewing is not the measure of true success,” Ms. Westerhaus said. “Interviewing is not hiring.” —Kate Moser

November 10, 2008

Indiana U. Panel Recommends Adding to, Not Removing, a Controversial Name

A high-level committee at Indiana University at Bloomington that reviewed the naming of an athletics center after a segregationist judge will recommend adding the name of a black athlete to the building’s moniker, the Indiana Daily Student reported.

The Ora L. Wildermuth Intramural Center was named in 1971, but the name became controversial only last year after a column in the student newspaper revealed that the judge, who had been a university trustee in the 1940s, had expressed segregationist views. Judge Wildermuth died in 1964.

J. Terry Clapacs, the university’s vice president and chief administrative officer who was chairman of the review committee, told the student newspaper today that the panel would recommend renaming the center the William L. Garrett/Ora L. Wildermuth Fieldhouse. Mr. Garrett, the university’s first black basketball player, died in 1974 after suffering a heart attack. —Charles Huckabee

U. of Texas Plans Its Own Sports Television Network

The University of Texas at Austin could be the first university to offer its own sports network for a wide audience and the latest entrant into the profitable field of televised college sports.

BusinessWeek reported last week that the university was negotiating with Time Warner, Comcast, and AT&T for distribution of the 24/7 sports network.

Texas boasts the biggest college-sports budget in the nation, an amount that reportedly exceeds $120-million a year, and the new sports network would broadcast a range of sports. “Texas has such an incredible fan base and such great content through all its sports programs that we feel a network like this will have a real following,” a senior vice president at IMG College told BusinessWeek. IMG College handles the university’s trademark licensing, marketing, and multimedia rights.

Televising college sports has attracted many new players in recent years, including College Sports Television, ESPNU, and Fox College Sports.

Big-time college-sports leagues have attempted to start their own networks, too. The Mountain West Conference started MountainWest Sports Network in 2006. The Big 10 Conference started its own sports network in 2007 through an agreement with Fox Cable Networks. The formation of that network initially created tension over the fees the Big 10 wanted to charge companies to carry the network.

It remains to be seen how much a Texas sports network could bring to the university. “The revenue pie for college sports stays essentially the same, but they keep slicing it up,” one television consultant told BusinessWeek. —Kate Moser

November 6, 2008

Coaches of Color Are Hard to Find in College Football

Big-time college football lags far behind other college and professional sports in its record of hiring minority coaches, according to a study issued today by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, at the University of Central Florida.

All but two of the 22 head coaches hired last year to lead the nation’s biggest football programs were white, bringing to eight the total number of nonwhite head football coaches in Division I-A football in the 2008 season, the report notes.

But in recent weeks, even that small number has dwindled, the report says. Late last month, the University of Washington fired Tyrone Willingham as its head coach, and Kansas State University announced this week that its head coach, Ron Prince, would leave at the end of the season. Both men are African-American.

Since 1996, 12 African-American head coaches have been hired out of 199 vacancies, said Richard E. Lapchick, author of the report and director of the institute. And though 54 percent of football players in Division I-A are African-American, Asian, or Latino, only 7 percent of head coaches and 33 percent of assistant coaches are, the report states. —Libby Sander

October 30, 2008

Winning on the Field, but How About in the Classroom?

Now that the NCAA is in its fifth year of measuring the academic performance of Division I athletes, the association’s leaders have turned their attention to coaches’ effectiveness at motivating athletes to succeed in the classroom.

At a meeting on Thursday, the NCAA’s Division I Board of Directors asked the division’s Committee on Academic Performance to develop a mechanism that would link athletes’ academic performance to the head coach who recruited and led them.

The academic-progress rate for athletes, which the NCAA put in place in 2004, rates teams and institutions according to the progress that athletes make toward earning degrees.

University presidents and others have advocated an “academic-progress rate” for head coaches to hold them accountable for athletes’ progress toward graduation. The rate would provide a “lifetime batting average” for the academic achievement of the coaches’ athletes, said the NCAA’s president, Myles Brand, in a teleconference this evening.

“We were holding institutions accountable through the academic-progress rate, and certainly student athletes and teams, but we had no measure comparable for coaches,” he said.

The rates for Division I head coaches, which would be publicly available, would follow them throughout their careers as a complement to their won-lost records, Mr. Brand said.

The committee has until April to come up with a plan for the board to consider. —Libby Sander

October 29, 2008

Chronicle and HBO Win Excellence in Sports Journalism Awards

Two reporters for The Chronicle have received the Excellence in Sports Journalism Award, presented by Sport in Society and the Northeastern University School of Journalism, to “recognize and honor journalists that look at the connection between sport and the societal issues of the world beyond the court and the field.”

The reporters, Brad Wolverton and Paul Fain, are being honored for a six-article series, titled “Booster U.” and published in two issues last fall, that won in the print/online journalism category. The award for broadcast journalism went to HBO’s Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel.

The Chronicle’s prize-winning articles were as follows:

• Growth in Sports Gifts May Mean Fewer Academic Donations
  
• Key Senator to Question Tax Treatment of Booster Clubs
  
• Oregon Debates Role of Big Sports Donors
  
• As Athletics Donations Go Up, Some Leaders Fret Over Booster Interference
  
• For Small Programs, Fund Raising Can Be a Ticket to the Big Time
  
• Advice From a Mega-Donor
  

This is the second time The Chronicle has won the award. That earlier award, in 1987, was presented to two Chronicle reporters, Charles Farrell and Peter Monaghan, and their editor, Jack Crowl, for the overall quality of their coverage.

Other past winners of the award include ESPN, ABC’s Nightline, Howard Cosell, Dick Schaap, Frank Deford and Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated, Robert Lipsyte of The New York Times, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams of the San Francisco Chronicle, and Pete Thamel of The New York Times. This year’s winners will collect their awards at a dinner in Boston in January. —Andrew Mytelka

NCAA Punishes U. of the District of Columbia for Rules Violations

The University of the District of Columbia’s athletics program will be on probation until 2013 for what the National Collegiate Athletic Association described today as “the most egregious lack of institutional control” its infractions committee had ever seen.

A report issued by the committee says a Wild West atmosphere prevailed at the Division II institution, in which NCAA bylaws and forms were ignored wholesale. The committee found that 104 athletes had been given financial aid without meeting eligibility or transfer requirements.

The university let 248 athletes and two prospective athletes practice or compete while they were ineligible from 2000 to 2004, the report says. That ineligibility stemmed from the university’s flouting “a number of longtime, basic rules that should have been easily adhered to,” the report says. The rules included regulations about transfer students and progress requirements.

In one example singled out by the infractions committee, the university gave a basketball prospect free housing at an apartment complex during the 2002-3 academic year, even though he never enrolled.

The university had no policies to carry out NCAA rules, and staff members did not cooperate with the NCAA’s investigation, the report says. The committee also found inaccuracies in statements by university officials to the investigators, including one signed by the university’s president in 2003.

Other penalties, both self-imposed and levied by the NCAA, include canceled seasons for certain sports, a one-year postseason ban on all teams, and a reduction in scholarships and recruiting privileges in some sports. This is the University of the District of Columbia’s second major NCAA infractions case. Its first was in 1991. —Kate Moser

October 26, 2008

T. Boone Pickens Pledges Another 'Major Gift' to Oklahoma State U. Athletics

T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire oil tycoon who gave $165-million to Oklahoma State University’s athletics department in 2005, said on Saturday that he would announce “another major gift” to the department on Monday. He did not reveal the value of the gift, but according to the Tulsa World, a source familiar with the situation said it would be $63-million.

The new gift will replenish a fund started with the earlier donation, Mr. Pickens said. That fund constitutes a big chunk of the money for stadium upgrades and an athletics village to be built at the Stillwater, Okla., campus, but the controversial project has been put on hold because the fund has taken a beating in the national economic downturn. Mr. Pickens would not divulge the fund’s value, the newspaper reported, but he did acknowledge that it had dropped about 60 percent.

He said money in the fund had been removed from market investments and deposited in a bank. “Sure, we took some losses,” he said. “Who didn’t in this crash?” Asked whether the gift he plans to announce on Monday will allow Oklahoma State to proceed with the athletics village, he said, “Not yet.”

Mr. Pickens is also the author of plan to help the university secure $280-million for the athletics program by establishing $10-million life-insurance policies on boosters. —Charles Huckabee

Updated on Monday, October 27: The university confirmed the size of the new gift as $63-million and said that $125-million of the original gift remained after market losses.