Thursday, April 19, 2007
The NCAA is about to fix a loophole in the rules that has been allowed to exist for too long.
Rules have always been in place that prevent coaches from making excessive and repeated phone calls to potential recruits. With text messaging, though, rules don’t apply. And therein lies the problem. Not only could coaches have unlimited, unregulated, instantaneous conversations with players, but they could also use a text message to prod the recruit into making a phone call to the coach.
Recruits are allowed to make as many calls to coaches as they’d like.
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Of course, the counterpoint to this is text messages in and of themselves depend on volume. A good text message “conversation” can drag on over four or five or six sent and received messages. For that to make sense, then, you’d have to limit a coach to something like 10 sent text messages per recruit per week.
The three most prominent coaches at the University of Kansas have all acknowledged that they rely on text messaging to communicate with recruits. Men’s basketball coach Bill Self will even tell the story of how standout freshman Darrell Arthur committed to the University via text message. His use of text messaging, as well as that of football coach Mark Mangino and women’s basketball coach Bonnie Henrickson, is prominent and entirely legal. But it’s just not right, especially when recruits or their parents could be faced with a large bill for those incoming notes.
Finally, however, the NCAA seems poised to make changes to its policies and ban text messaging.
The proposal, brought to the NCAA by the Ivy League, had two different options: One would have totally banned text messaging, while the other would limit the number of messages coaches could send.
The NCAA Division I management council has recommended banning all electronic communication — including instant messages, but not e-mails or faxes — between coaches and recruits. This seems like a bit of an overreaction. Just as phone calls and other forms of communication are limited by number and frequency, text messages should be as well.
Of course, the counterpoint to this is text messages in and of themselves depend on volume. A good text message “conversation” can drag on over four or five or six sent and received messages. For that to make sense, then, you’d have to limit a coach to something like 10 sent text messages per recruit per week.
That, however, would still be costly. For a recruit to receive and reply to that many text messages could cost as much as $2 a week. If more than one coach is recruiting that player, which is almost always the case, recruits could be spending $40 a month, just on text messages to and from coaches.
While also citing the potential for major expenses, the NCAA also mentioned that technology is adapting so rapidly that it is nearly impossible for a narrowly tailored rule proposed one year to still be germane by the time it’s implemented the next year.
Perhaps the biggest problem with this proposal will be enforcement. Text messages themselves are rarely tracked, which essentially means the only way to enforce a rule like this is through education and a student-athlete reporting a coach who misbehaves.
Text messaging had to be regulated, and the proposal on the table is a good first step toward ending some misbehavior. The proposal, if approved by the NCAA Board of Directors at its April 26 meeting, will probably need to be revisited regularly to stay out in front of modern technology.
Still, it’s good to see this regulation come out of the NCAA. Potential student-athletes deserve to have a little more distance between them and overzealous coaches.
Kealing is a Chesterfield, Mo., senior in journalism and political science.
— Edited by Ashley Thompson
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