By Staff
Coaching Management, 9.3, April 2001, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/cm/cm0903/bbcalendar.htm
A pair of proposals currently before the NCAA are focused on making recruiting more equitable and predictable—for coaches and players alike. The first would establish a recruiting calendar for Division I women’s volleyball, similar to those in football, basketball, and softball.
“It’s an effort by the coaches to make their recruiting life a little more sane and structured,” says Lisa Love, Associate Athletic Director at the University of Southern California and a member of the Division I Women’s Volleyball Committee.
Currently, there are restrictions on the number and types of contacts coaches can have with prospective student-athletes, but there are no regulations as to when coaches can contact prospects, which has resulted in year-round recruiting. The proposed legislation would establish contact/evaluation periods from late May through early December, and mid-February through April 30. Quiet periods, which allow only on-campus contact, would fill January, early February, May, and mid-December.
Also worked in would be dead periods, which allow no contact with recruits. These would occur during the weeks of the initial National Letter of Intent signing dates in November and April, as well as late December.
The proposal would also allow an additional coach to recruit off-campus from June 15 to July 15, raising the total number of off-campus recruiters per team to three. Programs would be limited to a total of 65 evaluation days for the whole staff, but employment at instructional camps or clinics and observation of prospects participating in high school volleyball competitions would not count as evaluation days.
A separate proposal would prohibit Division I coaches from coaching teams that include recruitable prospects. “If coaches are supplementing their incomes by coaching junior clubs in their areas, they could still do so by coaching under-age prospects, say under-14 or under-12 teams,” Love says. “But they could not coach recruitable athletes.
“This has been a very forgiving part of volleyball and was allowed to facilitate growth,” she continues. “But as the sport has taken off from coast to coast, it’s now reached a point when it could be viewed as a conflict of interest for someone associated with a university to be coaching potential recruits.”
Both proposals are working their way through the NCAA legislative process. The recruiting calendar could be implemented as soon as August 2001 with the new coaching restrictions possibly following in August 2002.