NCAA Boots Ivy Boosters

Relations between the Ivy League and the NCAA have always been a delicate subject. The NCAA, while it professes allegiance to amateurism, seems to be moving more towards professionalism every year.

The Ivy League, meanwhile, seems genuinely committed to excellence in the classroom first, and excellence on the field of play second.

The NCAA is televised on CBS, NBC and ABC. The Ivy League is televised on PBS.

While it remains highly unlikely that the Ivy schools would move to secede from the national body of college sport, such suggestions have been made in the past. And the recent passage of an NCAA rule limiting the role of alumni boosters in the recruiting process both illustrates and exacerbates the problem of Ivy-NCAA relations.

Alumni recruiting has been a traditional stronghold of the Ivy schools. With thousands of grads across the country--often organized into clubs and organizations--the Ivies saved assistant coaches immeasurable time and effort. Instead of coaches scouring the nation for appropriate talent and corrupt athletic boosters wooing hot prospects, Ivy alumni have established a reputation for fair and effective recruiting through letter writing, phone calling and interviewing. Personal visits, however, are prohibited.

It's a system which makes the alumni happy--they get a chance to be actively involved in the fortunes of their alma mater--and the coaches happy--they get to stay home and coach more.

"The Ivy rule mandates that funds that are used to bring in prospects to the campuses must come from the alumni," Executive Director of the Ivy Group Jeff Orleans says. "That's designed to say to the alumni community, 'if you are sufficiently interested in this, then you support the program rather than having us divert university funds that could be used instead for regular financial aid programs and the like."'

"The Ivy schools have a number of things in common," Orleans says. "All of us use the alumni schools quite heavily. The opportunity is provided by NCAA rules to bring students on campus. Schools vary and teams vary on the way they organize their visits, but we all do the big things pretty similarly."

Skip Jarocki, assistant director of athletics at Penn, assents. "Given the special nature of the Ivy League, it's important that some alumni involvement take place," Jarocki says.

But the NCAA doesn't agree. Rocked in recent years by booster-infected scandals, including rumors of alumni-paid prostitutes entertaining prospective athletes, the NCAA recently banned all alumni contact with high school athletes--unless all applicants are treated the same. In other words, an alumnus who recruits an athlete must also show a pattern of recruiting dozens of other students.

Harvard Director of Athletics John P. Reardon '60, a member of the NCAA Council, accepts the rationale of the new rule. "Anything that moves in the direction of treating all applicants the same way is okay," he says.

Nonetheless, neither he nor other Ivy administrators are particularly pleased with the new rule."

The notion that dishonest alumni--especially Ivy alums--are the root cause of collegiate cheating is "ridiculous," Reardon says. "we're just not afraid of our alumni," the Ivy League's Orleans says. "We don't have that problem of a `shadow economy' here."

"I can stand on my head in the NCAA office and say, `this is not going to do it. Taking alumni out of the system isn't going to eliminate the problem," says Reardon, who believes that colleges' misplaced priorities lead to athletic corruption.

The new rule, Reardon forecasts, is just going to put even more recruiting pressure on the assistant coaches. Orleans agrees. "We all think--starting with the coaches--that the coaches are [already] on the road too long recruiting," he says. "In football and basketball especially, the head coaches would like to see their assistants on campus more."

But with the alumni help gone, it seems that the assistants had better start packing their bags and making their airline reservations.

Fatigued assistants are not the only spectres facing the league as a result of the new rule. "I'm sure there will be some cases where Division I scholarship schools will attempt to blow the horn on schools like the Ivies," Penn's Jarocki says, "because of the [heavy] alumni involvement we do have." "This is a pain in the neck," Reardon says. "We've got to make darn sure alumni understand the rules and obey them.

There are no easy solutions in sight, but it seems that everybody has his own theory on what is to be done. "I think the Ivies as a group should look at the concept of alumni recruiting in an effort to develop a more uniform policy," Jarocki says. Reardon concurs.

Reardon also suggests that, nationwide, the schools--not the alumni boosters--should provide all the money for the athletic programs and have complete control over them. "What the hell are colleges doing in the business of sports?" he asks.

And the Ivy League schools must sometimes ask themselves, "What the hell are we doing in the NCAA?" They seem reluctant partners in a mismatched marriage, but the lawyers would still do well to keep clear. No divorce is in the offing.