Playing it $afe

Published: Friday, October 31, 1997

Friday, October 31, 1997

Playing it $afe

FEATURE: Athletic department ensures compliance with benefits rules through education and control

By Vytas Mazeika

Daily Bruin Staff

No college athletic program wants to find itself under probation.

Therefore, most colleges have two systems designed to keep the athletes and the school from being investigated by the NCAA.

The first program aims at teaching all student-athletes about the NCAA rules - especially those regarding extra benefits. Extra benefits violations fall into categories that range from free merchandise to free meals from restaurant owners to money from boosters. With college athletes technically considered amateurs, all of these "gifts" are considered a violation of their status.

The second program is basically a system of checks and balances run by the college with the purpose of discovering NCAA violations that come from within. There is a director of compliance whose job is to oversee financial aid, eligibility and rules interpretation for the institution.

Since the rules from the NCAA exist in a vast 500-page book, it is not easy to keep track of all the rules. Therefore the education process is of utmost importance if a college is to make sure a student-athlete abides by the NCAA rules.

Rich Herzog, UCLA's director of compliance, has rule meetings with all of the teams at the beginning of each year. If an athlete red-shirts his freshman year, then he will most likely be able to recite "The Terrible Ten" by the time he leaves UCLA. "The Terrible Ten" is an outline designed to showcase several NCAA rules to UCLA's athletes - extra benefits, gambling, agents, cheating, parking-permit abuse, unauthorized telephone use, unauthorized use of athletic-department equipment, ethical conduct, and employment.

UCLA has even expanded its education process to include coaches. Like athletes, the coaches receive memos about common ways in which NCAA rules can be broken and then they are given a quiz to ascertain their understanding of the extra-benefits rule. Common anecdotes address the recent exchange of athletic equipment for credit by USC football players and the time in which Arnold Palmer took out a Stanford golfer by the name of Tiger Woods to dinner.

It has become very hard for athletes to identify the fine line between what is right and what is wrong according to the NCAA.

"Unfortunately, athletes sometimes jump to the wrong conclusion," Herzog said. "In the case, for example, of the sandwiches that student athletes had in Westwood. They had a relationship with the manager of that restaurant and thought that they could (take the food) because of their relationship with that manager - they had played pick-up basketball with him. So they thought of (the food) as something that wasn't an extra benefit. The difficult thing about NCAA rules is that in most cases, the student athletes are probably held to a stricter standard than a regular student when it comes to extra benefits."

The NCAA is strict in order to allow an almost even playing field for all schools. With the even playing field also comes programs that are alike.

The director of compliance of another prominent West Coast school - he preferred to have neither his name nor his school named in this story -- runs an educational program much like the one at UCLA. Their athletes fill out paperwork, just like the Bruin athletes, and extra attention is paid to the basketball and football programs.

Earlier this week a Long Beach newspaper quoted former UCLA basketball coach Jim Harrick saying that coaches should not be held accountable for the mistakes athletes make. But the compliance director points out that not only are the athletes responsible for learning the rules, but the coaches are accountable for their athletes.

"In many instances, the coaches themselves take the responsibility of educating their student-athletes," the official said. "Especially once a coach and a program have been burned by something - like we've had a few agent problems in the past -- and you go through that as a coach, you kind of take it upon yourself in the future to deal with that sort of thing."

Even with all of these precautions by the institution, NCAA violations occur. So the college is forced to keep a system of checks and balances in charge of making sure that no serious violations taint the school's reputation.

This system is usually run by the director of compliance and the athletic department. In the other prominent West Coast school, all of the athletic-department employees (which amount to around 240 in total) are told to keep an eye open. If a coach of another sport notices that something is wrong, he is encouraged to come forward. In fact, there is even a clause in their contract requiring them to report any instances where they find an NCAA violation.

Chuck Smrt, the director of enforcement in the NCAA, said that there are two types of violations, secondary and major. Smrt also mentioned that about 95 percent of the secondary violations are self-reported by the schools, and in the other 5 percent, the schools usually acknowledge the problem when the NCAA asks the school for information.

"In self-reported secondary violations, the institution takes their own corrective and punitive action," Smrt said. "And in those cases, if an institution has taken (action), then there is no further action by the committee on infractions."

The existence of incentive for the institution to come forward with the violation is a big reason as to why schools report any problems. The NCAA has a four-year statute of limitations in which most penalties are enforced on future activities.

Therefore institutional responsibility, the length to which a school goes to prevent or catch as soon as possible NCAA violations, is of utmost importance. Herzog said that UCLA reports secondary violations more often than people understand. If one runs a system that has checks and balances, violations will be discovered.

There is not an exact definition for secondary or major violations - this is determined on a case-by-case basis. But Herzog, the unnamed official and Smrt point out that with institutional control most situations hazardous to the school's probation status are neatly resolved.

"If one secondary infraction goes unchecked, that isn't necessarily a problem, given that you have so many minor things that could happen, you couldn't be expected to have enough time in the day to be able to track them all," Herzog said. "More likely it would be that several secondary violations become a major (violation) because of lack of institutional control."

To solve secondary violations, all the school sometimes needs to do is either make the athlete pay restitution and suspend the athlete for a limited amount of time. Sometimes, if it's reasonable to assume that the athlete did not know he was breaking a rule, restitution may suffice.

In more complex cases, the school may ask the association to come in and help - like in the Harrick situation. If the situation is ignored and there seems to be a lack of institutional control, the NCAA usually steps in to double-check that everything is being thoroughly investigated.

In the end, though, most everything comes back to the education process and institutional control.

"(The student-athletes) have been informed clearly about the (extra-benefits) rule," the unnamed official said. "They have something in writing about it and that should be sufficient. You're dealing with kids in college, so there is going to be violations regardless of what you do. But there certainly are pro-active things you can do and we try to cover our bases that way."

Considering the way in which the NCAA can strip athletic programs of almost everything, most institutions try to cover their bases that way too.