Mike DeCourcy

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. - Scores of college basketball coaches gathered Friday at the Collegiate Business Conference to listen to presentations from Hall of Fame coaches and players, all of them hoping to gain some useful tip or nugget of knowledge that will help make them better at what they do.

Coaches are allowed to improve themselves in the summer.

They are not allowed to help make their players better, however.

At least not now.

Multiple coaches attending the conference said the buzz spreading through the coaching ranks from officials at the National Association of Basketball Coaches is that the NCAA will move soon -- perhaps in time for the rule to go into place by 2009 -- to allow college coaches to conduct skill work with their players for no more than two hours per week provided the athletes are enrolled in summer school.

The coaches also said they expect the NCAA to move toward requiring Division I basketball programs to fund summer school classes for their players.

It's like the NCAA powers all at once have come down with a devastating case of common sense.

In the world of college basketball, these would be two of the most significant advancements in the game's recent history.

Whereas the coaches could attend Friday's clinic at the Universal Hilton and listen to speakers such as Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Chuck Daly and Pat Summit give advice about how to be more effective as coaches, several coaches talked during the lunch break about how much more effective they could be if they were allowed to work with their players in the summers.

It was six years ago that a column about the need to allow college coaches to work with their players during the summer appeared in the pages of Sporting News.

"If they're going to call us 'Coach,' let us coach," Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun said then. "We allow the pursuit of excellence in every other area of the university. Why not in this very narrow area?"

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Texas coach Rick Barnes was even more emphatic at the time: "If you could let me change one rule, it would be that I could work with my players year-round. We spend the school year trying to build good habits and work ethic, and then comes three months when it stops."

The time since has not been kind to the game. Declining to allow coaches to work with their players in the summer months not only was illogical because it restricted these well-compensated men from doing the work for which they were being well compensated, it also allowed more negative influences to connect to the players.

It led to escalated use of private workout coaches by college players. There's nothing at all untoward about those personal coaches. Some of them are spectacularly gifted at training players to improve their games. But these men are not giving away their services. Somebody has to pay for it. And in those instances when the workout coaches are located somewhere other than the town where the player lives or attends school, somebody has to pick up the tab for the player's living expenses. The parents of some players can afford that. Frequently that is not possible, so the person writing the checks is an agent or runner.

While the NCAA leadership publicly expresses concern about the infiltration of college athletics by unscrupulous agents, its rules are empowering those very people.

If two weekly hours of summer work were permitted, the coaches would be allowed to help set and maintain what likely would be a more extensive workout plan for each player. It's hard for them to do that now when there's no way to monitor whether the work is being executed properly or if the results are as anticipated.

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Two hours is probably more restrictive than it needs to be. Since most players carry only a couple of classes in the summer, there would be room for probably twice that. But two hours would be better than nothing -- it would allow the coaches to remain the dominant basketball influence in their players' careers.

The summer school requirement would be of academic benefit for college basketball, which lags behind nearly all Division I sports in educational performance and graduation rates.

A player who attended summer school prior to his freshman year and picked up six credits each summer would accumulate 24 additional credit hours by the start of his senior year. That's nearly two semesters of "bonus" credits. With the NCAA demanding new academic progress rules, it would be nearly impossible for a basketball player to complete his senior season without being close to graduation.

Although most high-major programs currently have the majority of their players attend summer school classes, many mid-majors decline to make this available because it is an added expense. This will be a hardship for some marginal Division I programs, but what better money can an athletic department spend than dollars that will advance the education of its players?

There also will have to be consideration given for those few member universities that do no conduct summer sessions. It's a minor detail to manage in the pursuit of such major improvements to college basketball.