Put the student back in student-athlete
Teams can graduate their players if they only try
 | Special feature |
 | College hoops season preview Men's top 25 rankings, analysis, predictions and more. Cole Aldrich and Kansas are No. 1, but where does the rest of the field fall? NBCSports.com |
College basketball |
 | Slideshow |
 | more photos |
The numbers are depressingly familiar, probably because Richard Lapchick has been trotting them out every March for the last three years.
Like the bookies in Las Vegas, Lapchick spends the day after the NCAA tournament selections crunching stats and looking at possibilities. The oddsmakers are looking for point spreads, while Lapchick wants to see progress.
There’s not much of that to be found in the latest numbers, which track the graduation rates of the 65 teams now caught up in the madness of March. Once again, they paint a bleak picture of athletes who chase balls instead of degrees and coaches who care more about winning games than graduating players.
Using the NCAA’s latest data on graduation rates, Lapchick looked to see how the players in the tournament stack up against fellow athletes when it comes to graduating with a degree within six years of entering school.
The answer? Not very good.
The figures are fairly new, yet they show the same old thing. Juggernauts on the court, many teams are losers in the classroom.
Two universities — Louisiana State and Minnesota — are so inept at keeping players in class that they haven’t graduated an incoming basketball freshman in 10 years. And 42 of the 65 teams — including No. 1 seeds Illinois and Washington — don’t graduate half their players.
“There’s a lot of scary stuff there,” Lapchick said.
Lapchick studies these kind of things for a living as a sports sociologist who runs the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. But some of what he does is personal, driven by memories of his father, one of the NBA’s early dominant big men and later a college coach himself at St. John’s.
Lapchick remembers his father, Joe Lapchick, coming from St. John’s one day in 1956 and going upstairs, as was his custom, to change. When he didn’t come down right away, his 11-year-old son went up to see what was wrong.
“He was crying and I hadn’t seen him cry before. I hadn’t seen any grown man cry before,” Lapchick said. “He had found out his players weren’t going to class and were being passed through the system. He was horrified on two levels, first because he was a devout Catholic at a Catholic school and second because he prided himself on a personal relationship with the players.”
That relationship, Lapchick said, consisted mainly of his father talking to players about girlfriends and what kind of summer jobs they would have, not about academics. Those were days before television found college ball and before the hype of the NCAA tournament, but even then players still got a pass.
“He had total disconnect between himself and the academic institution,” Lapchick said.
Joe Lapchick was so disturbed by what was happening that he set up what Lapchick believes was the first mandatory study hall in college sports. He and his assistant, a young coach named Lou Carnesecca, soon brought the university to a 100 percent graduation rate.
“When you put your mind to it, things can really change,” Lapchick said.
One reason Lapchick isn’t so down about this year’s figures is that things may finally be changing for athletes on college campuses, just as they did nearly a half-century ago under his father at St. John’s.
The NCAA announced last month it would begin applying sanctions against teams that don’t have a 50 percent graduation rate, beginning next year. Teams who don’t meet the mark will lose scholarships, and repeat offenders could be declared ineligible for postseason play.
“It’s the best decision the NCAA has made on this issue,” Lapchick said. “I think we’ll see a dramatic impact on who coaches take into programs to begin with. They’re not going to risk losing scholarships or tournament spots.”
That’s precisely what NCAA president Myles Brand envisions.
“The graduation numbers have been embarrassing to the institution, but have not caused any behavioral changes,” Brand said. “What we have done is attach sanctions to poor graduation rates. We believe strongly that is going to change behavior over the years.”
They’re certainly listening at LSU, where athletic director Skip Bertman says a new emphasis in academics has every current player on track to graduate within six years. That includes forward Brandon Bass, this year’s SEC scholar-athlete of the year.
“They make it so easy for you to study and get grades here, it’s almost impossible to fail,” Bass said.
Lapchick was heartened when he spoke at LSU last fall and saw there was a new academic support center for athletes.
“I think they realized they had some issues they needed to correct,” he said.
The issues go beyond academic support. The new rules mean universities will think twice about giving scholarships to players who have no intention of going to class or are planning to leave after a year for the NBA.
Coaches will now have to be more careful about who they recruit, and what they do to keep a player in school. Graduation rates will rise, and people won’t snicker when athletes are referred to as student-athletes.
By then, Lapchick’s numbers may stop being so scary.
- Discuss Story On Newsvine
-
Rate Story:
LowHigh - Instant Message
MORE FROM COLLEGE BASKETBALL |
 College basketball Section Front |
| Add College basketball headlines to your news reader: |
Sponsored links