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Senate briefed on NCAA certification
By DONNA LONGENECKER
Reporter Assistant Editor
The NCAA certification process at UB is coming to a close, with that organization's report on its site visit due any day now and final word on certification coming in April, Barbara Ricotta, associate vice president for student affairs and chair of the steering committee overseeing the certification process, told the Faculty Senate on Tuesday.
The purpose of the certification program, which occurs at 10-year intervals with a five-year interim status report, is to ensure integrity in the athletic operations of colleges and universities.
A subcommittee was formed, Ricotta said, to review the first cycle of certification, completed in 1996. The subcommittee's review was a three-month process that evaluated UB's progress toward recommendations made during that first cycle and to ensure conformity with NCAA rules and regulations.
"The NCAA has a fundamental commitment to the integrity of intercollegiate athletics," she explained, noting that the goal of certification is to "open up athletics to the rest of the university and the public" and to set standards and operating principles by which the athletics programs abide. Tough sanctions often are the result if the operating principles of the NCAA are not met by the university, she said.
A self-study report of the university's athletics program was submitted to the NCAA in August, and an NCAA site team spent two- and-a-half days visiting campus early last month. The team interviewed President William R. Greiner, many of the vice-presidents, members of the coaching staff, members of the steering and subcommittees, and members of the provost's staff, Ricotta said.
"We are now anxiously awaiting their report, which should be out any day now," she said. "They will provide us with a written report on both the self-study and the site visit with us, and we will have an opportunity to respond to any questions or concerns they may have. We hope to hear sometime in April whether we received certification or not. We're kind of in a holding pattern right now."
The NCAA certification process focuses on four areas: governance and rules compliance, academic and fiscal integrity, the university's commitment to equity, student-athlete welfare and sportsmanship. The steering committee chaired by Ricotta coordinated the work of four subcommittees established for each of the four areas of study.
"We had approximately 75 folks working on the certification process," she said, adding that committees were comprised of both athletics staff and staff from the university at large. The subcommittees reviewed their areas of study to determine if UB was in compliance with NCAA operating principles and recommend improvements.
During UB's first certification cycle in 1996, the only area in which corrective conditions were imposed by the NCAA's Committee on Athletics Certification (CAC) concerned equity, welfare and sportsmanship. The university was required to develop and submit two comprehensive institutional plans, one that addressed gender equity in its intercollegiate athletic programs (IA) and a plan for improving opportunities for traditionally underrepresented ethnic groups in IA programs. The subcommittee charged with reviewing progress made in this area found that over the past six years UB has made substantial progress on both issues, while a small number of concerns remain to be addressed regarding gender equity.
"UB has demonstrated an extremely high commitment to making measurable progress toward ensuring fair and equitable treatment of all student-athletes and athletics department personnel who are members of traditionally underrepresented groups," the self-study's executive summary noted.
Ricotta told senators that overall, the self-study report found that UB was in substantial conformance with all areas and operating principles established by the NCAA.
"However, (the self-study process) also gave us the opportunity to look at recommendations and ways to improve the program," she said. "We spent about three and a half months looking at conformity with the principles and what kind of recommendations we would want to make (in the self-study). Each of the subcommittees came up with a number of recommendations and ways to improve the process."
Among those recommendations were some that deal specifically with continued improvement in the areas of equity, welfare and sportsmanship:
Continue to implement and to request that the Intercollegiate Athletics Board (IAB) closely monitor the current long-range plan for increasing grants-in-aid (GIA) allocated to women's teams
Monitor the money spent on recruiting for women's programs and to encourage the coaches of women's programs to more fully utilize resources provided
Evaluate staffing of women's programs to ensure it is equitable with men's programs
Build on the success of marketing women's basketball and apply it to other women's sports to increase awareness of the women's athletics program
Michael Cohen, chair of the Faculty Senate and professor of neurology, mentioned that the NCAA site team was very concerned about whether faculty members understood and were comfortable with UB's athletics programs.
Cohen pointed out that the site team also was concerned that athletes have a "university experience" that prepares them for something other than athletics when they leave the university. "That seemed to be echoed time and time again in the meetings I had," he said.
The self-study report can be reviewed by visiting http://www.ubathletics.buffalo.edu.