SAAC sends petition to NCAA don't shorten our schedules.

Another good find by BLD. Your rocking this week....no baseball so trolling the internet

For DIII parents, forward to your athlete son's/daughter's for signature.

Thanks. For baseball this has the possibility of removing 4 games. D3 already has the lowest number of games allowed. No reason to lower it further.

Unfortunately, it doesn't have to make sense for the NCAA to pass it. Any pretense of looking out for athletes left the building many years ago...

This seems to be the NCAA version. Note the underemphasis on "limiting costs".

http://www.ncaa.org/about/reso...eyes-future-deficits

[Reduction in number of contests

The council voted to co-sponsor proposed legislation – initially sponsored by the Old Dominion Athletic Conference and the Centennial Conference – that would reduce the maximum number of in-season contests (or dates of competition, depending on the sport) by up to 10 percent. The reduction would apply to nearly every sport, save for those with only a handful of contests such as football (10) and cross country (9).

The conferences brought the proposal forward in hopes of limiting costs and ensuring that student-athletes can devote more time to academics and other extracurricular endeavors. The proposal wouldn’t shorten the overall length of the playing season, but simply eliminate a few contests – particularly those played midweek that disrupt classes – within the current timeframes allotted for sports’ regular seasons.

The presidents council debated the merits of the proposal and, ultimately, voted to co-sponsor it, arguing that it would be beneficial to student-athletes because it would ease their athletics burdens.

“Our concern as presidents was the fact that students were being drawn away during the week,” Cureton said. “The idea is to protect the students’ time so that they have what they need in the classroom and aren’t spending it out on the road or away from campus because of athletic contests.”]

Gee, I wonder what the vote would be of the tried that crap with DI....haha

I think if you would ask most student athletes, they would not want their Athletic Burden reduced. I think there are other ways to lessen the number of weekday days Games are played. For instance the NCAC has all their conference games as a DH on Saturday and Sunday. This usually limits the week day games to 1. In reality this effort is purely for money savings.

The D3 SAAC, http://www.ncaa.org/governance...s/division-iii-saac, clearly agrees with this proposal. If you look at the SAAC's mission statement:

quote:

The NCAA Division III Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) strives to enhance the total student-athlete experience by promoting opportunity for all student-athletes; protecting student- athlete well-being; and fostering a positive student-athlete image, while maintaining the tenants of the Division III philosophy.

you see that they are there to support the Student Athlete. If the ODAC and Centennial conference want to limit weekday games there is no reason they cannot. Each conference has a level of autonomy. Nothing says they have to play a whole slate of games.  

EDIT: Grammatical and Spelling errors corrected. Note to self, proof read. use There and not the possessive Their. 

I don't have a dog in the fight but this is just absolute overreaching legislation by a governing body to a knee jerk reaction of someone "looking out for the interests of the students".  OK I get it - sometimes the athletic budget gets stretched too far.  Trust me I know because when I took over as AD at our high school athletics was about $40K in debt.  I had to get REALLY creative in making the money work so yes there are situation where you do need to cut back spending.  BUT (and here's where I bring logic into the equation which is tough to understand for some) why don't the schools who are struggling financially / missing too much class time make these changes on their own instead of passing a rule that affects everyone?  You are essentially passing a rule that will hurt those who do things correctly because some can't figure out how to do it correctly (or in my case took over for those who can't do it correctly).  If you are hurting financially then figure out what's bleeding money, make changes to correct it and then recover.  In three years as AD we have went from $40K in debt to a profit of about $11K.  We are still hurting but I'm now able to do more things because we cut spending in order to recover.  Nobody had to pass a rule that affected all schools in order for my school to get back right.  

Plus, this is the 21st century.  We have all the knowledge of the world's history in the palm of our hands through our phones.  We have tablets and laptops that are able to pretty much do anything.  We now teach classes online because it now allows people 100 miles away to get credits from a school and the person doesn't have to travel to be on campus to attend class.  So why is student athletes missing class time such a huge deal?  At the end of the day it's no different than back in our day when we had to buy books and attend class.  You either had the maturity and responsibility to do what needed to be done or you didn't.  Same with these guys now - either get the work done to learn / get credit or you don't.  Regardless of whether you are sitting in class or in a hotel room / bus you get the work done or not on your own.  It's your job.

quote:

  FYI - the bill has been sent back to the NCAA to review whether there might be some gender equality problems with it. There have been some sports who wonder by not including a sport like football (all once-a-week sports have not been included) if that makes it genderly unequal. Nothing to report as of yet, but it is being looked into back at the President's Council and I believe by those in the legal department.

At this point, it will be brought up at the Convention in January. However, the President's Council could pull it's support (usually an indication the bill will be voted down or killed), the bill could still be presented so debate may happen (I think debate on the topic is a worthwhile endeavor), or they can announce at the time the bill is brought up that it has been tabled.