I do not know for certain if this has an impact at the FCS level... but apparently the NCAA is now surveying about the time demands of all Division I student-athletes.
Excerpts of the survey were recently filed by plaintiffs in their lawsuit against the NCAA and conferences over scholarship compensation. Some of the anonymous comments:
“I think CARA activities could be increased to 25 hours and you eliminate voluntary activities all together.”
“Please do not increase CARA hours … we are already moving to a ‘semi-pro' model in collegiate athletics, and increasing the hours would (solidify) that and take away from our educational opportunities.”
“Coaches (nowadays) have brainwashed their (athletes) into ‘Mandatory/Voluntary' and (athletes) are scared to come forward and inform compliance office of violations.”
“Student-athletes spend 40-60 hrs/week with their sport, which is confusing to them when we tell them they are limited to 20 hrs/week … and they can't keep track of what counts as CARA and what doesn't. All they know (is) that they are spending HUGE amounts of time with their sport, and they don't have time for school work or anything that integrates them into the normal student college experience.”
“If a student-athlete wants to voluntarily spend more time with a coach, this should be allowed. The college experience is too short and the influence a great coach can have on the future of an athlete should never be underestimated.”
“In turn, we need to lengthen the periods of time where coaches may NOT be involved in the student-athlete's time on campus, e.g., where they can be NORMAL HUMAN BEINGS. They train as much as they want, but not in any fashion organized by the coaches. We are not a minor league for the pro sports, but that is how we currently run our organization.”
Is the NCAA at a crossroads regarding this issue?
All the Ivy League needs to become relevant again is to diversify its OOC schedule.
So is the end result of this trend that student athletes will get boatloads of COA money but they will be literally not allowed any free time to use it.
You know, it IS a voluntary thing. If you don't want to have what's demanded of being a NCAA "student athlete" demanded of you, you can always opt not to be a NCAA student athlete.
Well, I believe that I must tell the truth
And say things as they really are
But if I told the truth and nothing but the truth
Could I ever be a star? Deep Purple: No One Came
Meh. 60 hours a week is only 8.5 hours a day. Mind you at most schools athletes can get their academics/assignments/tests from tutors if/when needed.
I had 2 sisters get full rides for T&F, never once did they ever have an issue balancing academic/athletic schedules. Now granted during the peak time of their season's they didn't have much social life aside from what came with hanging out with team members, but that is the trade off for a free degree.
SDHornet wrote:Meh. 60 hours a week is only 8.5 hours a day. Mind you at most schools athletes can get their academics/assignments/tests from tutors if/when needed.
I had 2 sisters get full rides for T&F, never once did they ever have an issue balancing academic/athletic schedules. Now granted during the peak time of their season's they didn't have much social life aside from what came with hanging out with team members, but that is the trade off for a free degree.
Right, but I think the bigger concern is that this could become an unregulated arms race where the amount of "voluntary" workout, etc., time keeps increasing with no end in sight. Kind of like what could happen with legalized COA payments.
SDHornet wrote:Meh. 60 hours a week is only 8.5 hours a day. Mind you at most schools athletes can get their academics/assignments/tests from tutors if/when needed.
I had 2 sisters get full rides for T&F, never once did they ever have an issue balancing academic/athletic schedules. Now granted during the peak time of their season's they didn't have much social life aside from what came with hanging out with team members, but that is the trade off for a free degree.
Right, but I think the bigger concern is that this could become an unregulated arms race where the amount of "voluntary" workout, etc., time keeps increasing with no end in sight. Kind of like what could happen with legalized COA payments.
True, but the smart coaches/trainers will also know that over working the athletes will have negative results too. Every winter and summer my sisters had a calendar/list of "voluntary" workouts to do in the "off season". It's already been happening.
And COA's have long existed at schools with the means...just usually in the forms of "grants" and "scholarships". COA is basically just a way to stop beating around the bush about getting funds to student athletes.
I was "technically" a I-A quarterback (albeit 6th string with no chance of seeing the field ever except for maybe senior day, but that's another story), and I'll confirm Andy's story about the time commitment. It even included weights on Sunday for those who didn't want to get up at zero-dark-thirty on Monday.
And when I was at Sac (only a couple of years following Sac's jump from D-II), it was about the same, except for no Sunday option. Zero-dark-thirty it was, the only difference being that we could choose whether or not we wanted to hit the weight room or the track in the morning, and doing the other in the afternoon. I found it much easier to put one foot in front of the other at that time of the morning than to do a coordinated movement like lifting a weight. Plus, at Sac, there was the "coaching class" we had to sign up for that functioned as the mechanism by which the offense and defense were installed before Spring Ball. (It WAS technically open to the entire student body as part of a coaching minor, but only one or two non-playing students took the class.)
SuperHornet's Athletics Hall of Fame includes Jacksonville State kicker Ashley Martin, the first girl to score in a Division I football game. She kicked 3 PATs in a 2001 game for J-State.
The Ivies are leading the way in setting time-demands of their student-athletes; the two rules below will take effect this fall.
The first change gives student-athletes a 10-hour window of no athletic activity following their return from a road trip. The second requires a two-week recovery period with no allowable team athletic activity upon the completion of the team's final contest of the season.
“We have a long history of regulating time demands beyond what the NCAA requires, and we’ve been paying attention to the conversation about these issues the past couple of years,” said Robin Harris, executive director of the Ivy League. “Our athletic directors just asked themselves, ‘Why can’t we just do this?’ The answer was, ‘Of course we can do this.’ We hope that it shows that this is not that hard.”
The Ivy League -- whose members include Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton and Yale Universities, Dartmouth College, and the University of Pennsylvania -- has long beaten the NCAA to the punch on issues of athlete welfare in Division I, the associations' most competitive level.
All the Ivy League needs to become relevant again is to diversify its OOC schedule.
