No rules, just suggestions

NCAA: Schools on their own regarding athletes' safety

Down through the years, you can’t help but wonder if the NCAA veered badly off course. Or pushed its original mission to the back burner.

If you study history, the NCAA owes its very existence to high-placed angst over sports safety. President Teddy Roosevelt, after 18 football players were killed in 1906, told colleges to make the playing field safer, which gave birth to the NCAA.

The NCAA still has a finger in the safety issue, sure. It publishes safety pamphlets, sponsors sports health-related surveys and even offers recommendations to its member colleges.

But does it police or monitor safety? Not at all.

The NCAA manual is stuffed with rules spelling out that the value of an MVP award can’t exceed $300, specifics on “quiet’’ and “dead’’ recruiting periods and everything you ever wanted to know about what can and can’t be provided during a 48-hour official recruiting visit.

Everything in the rule book is policed by the NCAA enforcement staff. If an athletic program gets busted, it’s likely to get slapped with probation. Maybe told to forfeit a postseason appearance or have its scholarships cut.

Yet surprisingly, the NCAA fails to have any mandates or requirements for athlete safety, leaving that to the budgets and whims of individual schools. It offers only suggestions and recommendations.

So athletic programs aren’t required to have an emergency medical plan. Nor an ambulance on site for, say, football practice.

Nowhere is a rule about having a telephone line available at practice sites. Nor does the NCAA require that coaches be versed in life-saving techniques. Or that programs even have certified athletic trainers.

“I don’t believe there is anything in our legislation that spells out anything that specific,’’ says NCAA spokesperson Jane Jankowski. “That is the university’s responsibility. There is no NCAA oversight per se.’’

And so the NCAA enforcement staff has no safety guidelines to hold athletic programs to, and isn’t enlisted to even monitor them -- an alarming situation in light of college football's recent heat-related illnesses and deaths.

“The NCAA spends more time, it appears to me, sanctioning schools and getting on schools for a booster doing something,’’ says Linda Will, whose son, Northwestern strong safety Rashidi Wheeler, died from an apparent exercise-induced asthma during a practice last August. “When it comes to someone’s loss of life it is like they play deaf, dumb and blind. Or it’s ‘Oh, we’re gonna establish more guidelines.’

“I never thought I’d be one to call for more governmental intervention, but that is what I am seeking now. There has got to be some policing body that when schools pass into an area of abuse, that someone says, ‘Wait a minute, this won’t be allowed.’"

After the deaths last summer of Wheeler and University of Florida freshman Eraste Autin in “voluntary’’ practices, an educational package was sent to every college regarding heat illness. It was recommended that schools have a preseason on-campus meeting involving the team physician, head trainer, football coach, athletic administration and the chancellor or president.

The NCAA also allowed incoming freshmen to participate in voluntary summer football workouts supervised by a strength and conditioning coach. In addition, medical coverage is now provided for athletes injured during these workouts.

But signs of unsafe conditions didn’t just surface last summer, and the problem isn’t just with football.

In the March 15, 1999, issue of The NCAA News, the Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports reported that “10 percent or more’’ football and basketball programs had no emergency medical plan for practices and games.

Linda Will and her attorney, James Montgomery, contend Northwestern had no emergency plan in place when her son collapsed on the practice field -- or if there was one, it was disastrously executed.

The same NCAA-sponsored survey of universities found that emergency plans were lacking at more than one-third of the athletic programs sponsoring skill instructions or strength and conditioning workouts.

Less than 50 percent of the cross-country and track programs, for instance, had emergency coverage for strength and conditioning workouts or required their athletic personnel to be trained in CPR and first aid.

Dr. Bryan Smith, chairman of the committee, acknowledges that the percentage of programs without emergency plans was surprisingly high, adding that a follow-up study may be undertaken within the next year.

“I would hope that institutions have improved their emergency care plans and that they have done so on a consistent basis, but we don’t have the data to say whether there has been a significant change or not,’’ says Smith, the University of North Carolina team physician.

That’s the problem. Neither the NCAA nor anyone else holds athletic programs accountable on life-threatening safety and health issues. Yet Smith, contending the NCAA shouldn’t set broad standards, argues that athletes are best served when individual athletic programs monitor safety issues.

Others disagree. “It is shocking that there is no policing of the universities and that they are left to their own devices," says Montgomery.

With all the money floating through college sports, what’s truly alarming is that that medical care and the safety of college athletes is even an issue. Look around. You have the NCAA banking a $6 billion broadcast deal with CBS, high-profile coaches routinely landing six-figure contracts and some $4 billion in athletic facility construction projects now under way on college campuses.

If the NCAA brass is against providing athletes anything more than a scholarship, don't they at least have an ethical obligation to spend whatever it takes to preserve those athletes' health -- even their lives? Isn’t that what put the NCAA in business?