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The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 12, 2001 NCAA Cracks Down on Foreign Athletes, While Urging Members to Relax Rules By DANA MULHAUSER To keep their teams competitive on the court, college basketball coaches are increasingly looking across the ocean for players. And the Laseges and Mikulases of the world are keeping up with the Joneses. But getting to the court has suddenly become a lot harder for them. This past summer, the National Collegiate Athletic Association began cracking down on foreign athletes accused of violating the association's rules governing amateur status. At first, the players faced a suspension of up to one game for each game they had played on a foreign club team. The problem with the club teams in many countries is that, even if the young players are not paid, their teammates often are, a situation that breaches the association's amateurism rules. In addition, some benefits that players in other countries receive, like housing, violate NCAA rules. But the club systems of Europe, South America, and elsewhere have been in place for years, and the NCAA has largely ignored the innate contradictions between the American system of sport development and those of other countries. "When you go to Europe and recruit a kid, you don't watch him play in high school, you watch him play for a club team," said Gene Keady, the coach at Purdue University's main campus. "Why didn't [the NCAA] care about that 20 years ago?" The irony is that the NCAA is suddenly trying to enforce its rules forbidding players from competing with professionals at the very same time that it is lobbying its members to relax those rules. Christine H.B. Grant, the former women's athletics director at the University of Iowa, has led a two-year campaign to alter principles designed to ensure that American players are not professionals, because those principles are often lost in translation for overseas athletes. Easing Penalties While the NCAA debates changing its amateurism rules, it is also trying to enforce those already in place. Its efforts started in the spring, when two members of the NCAA's rules-enforcement staff went to Europe on a fact-finding mission. They met with foreign league officials, gathered rosters, and studied up on the workings of professional leagues. What they found is what American basketball coaches have known for years: that in Europe, amateurism and professionalism are often hard to untangle. In virtually all countries other than the United States, athletes participate in basketball, soccer, tennis, and other clubs that have no affiliation with schools or colleges. Club-team rosters often include a mix of paid professionals and unpaid teenagers. "These kids don't have an option. They don't have a high-school team," said James A. Haney, director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. "If they're going to play internationally, they're going to play on a club team." The NCAA investigators' discoveries in Europe, combined with research into leagues in South America and Australia, led the association to send letters of inquiry to 52 of its member colleges. In the letters, the association asked the institutions to provide information about the eligibility of foreign basketball players, both current ones and those they were recruiting. The request, however, generated an outcry, and the association eventually backed down. After lobbying by the coaches, the NCAA eased the suspensions of foreign players to the equivalent of 20 percent of games they had played on top-tier foreign club teams, up to eight games. Even that is not enough for the coaches, however, who want a "grandfather clause" to exempt players already in college. Most of the colleges involved are in the process of gathering the eligibility information requested by the NCAA, and are still unsure if their players will be suspended this season. Selective Enforcement And while they wait, they fume. "Obviously, foreign players have been coming over here to play college basketball in the past, and it was OK then," said Bill Herrion, coach of East Carolina University. "Why is it not OK now?" Mr. Herrion is waiting to hear from the NCAA about the eligibility of his star forward, Gabriel Mikulas. Mr. Mikulas played nine games with an Argentinian club team before entering college. The NCAA says that it is only now able to glean the information that makes proper enforcement possible. "In the last two years, we have gained more information about foreign leagues," said Cedric W. Dempsey, the NCAA's president. The NCAA also maintains that the rules have been on the books for years, and that they were specifically clarified in a 1999 directive. In the past 10 years, 67 foreign players across several sports have been penalized or disqualified for playing with professionals. Coaches, however, say that the NCAA has not properly publicized the rule. Mr. Haney points to guidelines that the association distributes to colleges for the recruiting of foreign players. For all the list's dos and don'ts, it provides no warning about recruiting players who have played alongside professionals. And foreign players themselves have even less information about the rules. Take Muhammed Lasege. Born in Nigeria, Mr. Lasege went to Russia at 17 in 1997 in an attempt to obtain an American visa. While there, he told a Kentucky court last year, he was kept under armed guard and forced to sign a contract with a club team. When he did make it to the United States in 1999, to the University of Louisville, the NCAA ruled that he was ineligible to play college basketball because he had violated its amateurism rules. Two years' worth of court battles confirmed the NCAA's right to bar the 6-foot-11 center from playing. However, Louisville agreed to honor his scholarship, and he was hired as a student-assistant coach by the Cardinals' new coach, Rick Pitino. Mr. Lasege says that the NCAA has failed not only him but all foreign players by tightening its enforcement without publicizing the rules. "If you know a rule and you break it, that's wrong," Mr. Lasege said. "But I didn't know what the rules were, and neither do most other foreign players." Mr. Lasege and others also maintain that the recent attention to enforcement is directed unfairly at international players. "They show more interest in you if you're foreign-born," he said. The NCAA, however, says that it is not singling out foreign players. "If we had similar situations with American players, we would do the same thing," Mr. Dempsey said. Amateurism Redefined? The recent attempts to enforce penalties are part of a larger debate within the NCAA about whether to ease them or, in some cases, abolish them altogether. In 1999, the amateurism committee produced a proposal that would radically alter the eligibility rules for college athletes. High-school players who had accepted prize money or played professionally for up to a year could play college sports with no penalties. Once in college, players also would be allowed to earn money for giving lessons in their sport. The NCAA has repeatedly postponed a final decision on the proposal, first to April 2001, then to October 2001, now to April 2002. The proposal itself has already gone through one major revision, and it has now been chopped up into several packages, any or none of which could be accepted. One possible modification would exclude basketball from the proposal altogether. The NCAA has spent the past two years studying amateurism, and the status of foreign athletes, from every angle. In that environment of close examination, enforcing the existing rules has become crucial for the NCAA, according to Mr. Haney. "Everyone's aware that there's greater scrutiny on foreign student athletes related to the amateurism proposal," Mr. Haney said. Many coaches say that the NCAA is punishing them because the members of the National Association of Basketball Coaches voted not to support the new amateurism proposal. "Maybe that [NABC] vote had something to do with this," Mr. Herrion said. Mr. Haney said that the subject has been a matter of speculation among coaches, but it would be very difficult to prove. Jane M. Jankowski, an NCAA spokeswoman, maintains that the trip overseas, and the penalties that followed, were not prompted by the NABC's vote, or by anything relating to the amateurism proposal. "They just felt that they needed to go overseas and see how the system works," she said. So while the NCAA considers abolishing the rules, it enforces them with new vigor. "While this is still up in the air, we have to carry on under the existing rules," Mr. Dempsey said. Those rules mean that Mr. Lasege is still not on Louisville's roster. While he does hope to play college basketball, he has exhausted his legal appeals. His only hope is for the NCAA to change its rules. Every day, he works out privately with Mr. Pitino, the Louisville coach. But when his teammates take the court, he watches from the sidelines.
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