Joevan Catron, sophomore forward for the Oregon men’s basketball team, has a passion for art and design. He even comes up with his own shoe designs, which he applies to white-on-white Nikes, and has said that he had Nike in mind as a possible future employer when he chose to attend Oregon. Earlier this year he said that he had hoped to pursue an art degree.
Unfortunately for Catron, the numbers might not add up.
Art majors are accepted by application and selection, and the number of open-enrollment undergraduate art classes is too limited for Catron to meet his NCAA-required academic progress percentages should his spring term application be denied for fall term enrollment as a full major.
Catron is left with a tough decision: Follow his heart and risk his eligibility or find another major?
Neither scenario is ideal, but this is a common situation for student athletes under today’s guidelines for academic progress.
Steve Stolp, director of the University of Oregon’s Services for Student Athletes, said that the best thing that players can do is try to pick their majors early, especially high-credit majors, but that can be problematic as well.
“That’s so hard to do with someone who’s a freshman, trying to make a decision about what it is you think you want to do with the rest of your life,” said Stolp. “A lot of them are really focused on their sport, or they haven’t really taken enough courses here yet to know if there’s something that really interests them.”
Kim Durand, associate athletic director for human development at the University of Washington, said that one of the biggest challenges advisers face is striking a balance between what athletes are passionate about and what fits realistically into the NCAA’s required percentages.
“There are some unintended consequences (with the current percentage requirements) that force us to be in a little bit of an awkward situation with a student that is really passionate about something (with high credit requirements) like architecture, but because of NCAA restrictions can’t retake a class that he needs to or needs to make progress at a set or certain speed,” she said. “So I think sometimes, in the trenches, there are some awkward situations, but overall the concept is really where we need to be.”
The crackdown
Among NCAA Division I sports, men’s basketball ranks dead last in graduation rates. According to current NCAA graduation success rates, 70 percent of male student athletes graduate. In basketball, that rate is 61 percent.
The sport’s poor academic record was one of the main reasons behind NCAA academic reform packages that include penalties for teams who fail to graduate their athletes. Now, teams that fall below the NCAA’s standards face losing scholarships – a high price in a sport that relies on a handful of players to win games.
The standards have seemed to help improve the rate of academic success at schools nationwide, as the numbers have been moving steadily upward over the last three years.
But even at Oregon, a program that graduated five seniors before the season began, the NCAA’s new academic requirements have created a new challenge: Meeting the deadlines for NCAA compliance while allowing athletes the time to explore and choose an appropriate major.
Currently, an athlete who wishes to remain eligible to play must declare a major by the end of their seventh term in college, and show progress toward that major in 20-percent increments: 40 percent going into their third year, 60 percent going into the fourth and so on until graduation.
Here is where regulations meet reality for Catron. If he declares an art major and then isn’t accepted into the program, there aren’t enough open-enrollment art classes for him to keep up with the 20 percent increments, meaning he won’t have enough time to work toward full-major status in the art program, and he’ll just have to move on.
Contrast this situation with a typical student, who might re-take classes and build up his or her portfolio after an initial denial into the program, and end up getting in later. There is no such option for an athlete who wishes to remain eligible.
And while most would agree that having benchmarks to meet (and consequences for not doing so) is a step in the right direction for men’s basketball and college athletics in general, Catron’s situation illuminates one of the possible negative side effects.
The Stolp solution
Amid this atmosphere of academic emphasis and regulation reform in college sports, the Oregon men’s basketball program is one of many programs seeking practical ways for their players to adhere to the guidelines. Stolp and coach Ernie Kent sat down four years ago and drew up a three-year plan for their athletes to earn their degrees, and with the success of this year’s senior class at graduating early, heads are starting to turn in Oregon’s direction.
Kent sits on the college basketball board of directors and the basketball issues committee, which includes a mix of athletic directors, conference commissioners and coaches from conferences around the country, and said that the members of both groups are very interested in the Oregon academic plan.
“Between the two boards, we’ve been able to have a lot of impact,” said Kent.
One way that Oregon’s three-year plan deals with the issue of the NCAA’s percentage requirements is by front-loading the plan with required “general education” classes, so that no matter what major an athlete chooses he’s likely to be ahead of the percentage requirements. This can also serve as a useful tool to get athletes motivated to graduate, according to Stolp.
“We have to be ahead of the curve,” he said. “If you can convince (players) early on in the first two years to take as much credits as possible and work as hard as they can, then when they get to that junior year and they see ‘Well, I only have 40 credits left and I can actually finish this year,’ there’s a different motivation there than with somebody who can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
And while this may seem rigid, Stolp and Kent insist that by recruiting the right athletes, the program has avoided any backlash or burnout from the intense nature of the accelerated plan.
“You are putting pressure on the students to basically go to school all year round,” said Kent. “But if it’s not a priority to them, I don’t know if they should be in your program in the first place.”
“It’s a credit to Ernie that this is what we’re recruiting with,” said Stolp. “The guys that come here with their families, they know from day one that the expectation is that you are going to come here and you are going to perform. If that’s not them, they probably won’t come here.”
Kent said he also has no problem using extra running or limited playing time as a motivational tool for his athletes when it comes to academics if necessary. He disciplined freshman guard Kamyron Brown this year with limited playing time for slipping up academically.
“Sometimes guys have sat, and guys have missed practice because of academics as well,” he said. “It’s a thing where people have not started because you have two people competing and one’s not taking care of their academic responsibilities. So we try to keep focus on it, and then also the penalty is there when you don’t get your job done.”
And despite the commitment to academics that Kent makes sure his recruits have in place, Catron said that Kent and his staff’s emphasis on academics was still a little bit surprising for him when he arrived at Oregon last year.
“Every little thing they were yelling at me about, and I was wondering like, ‘Why are these guys yelling so much?’ because it seemed so small,” he said. “But those small things add up to big ones and when they hold you accountable for the little things then you don’t have to worry about the big ones that can accumulate later.”
Stolp admitted tha
t the plan could never be perfect, and the reality is that no matter how well supported the athletes are academically and how well planned their path to graduation is, in college sports it still comes down to how badly the athletes want their degrees.
“We don’t always get it right. We’re human. We try and help kids explore and find ways to get through, and to be honest with you, the kids that really want to do it end up doing it and getting their degrees,” said Stolp. “The kids that come here that have no real interest in school and they don’t want to do it and they’re here to play their sport, it becomes much harder to convince them to get their degrees.”
For Catron’s part, he said he will apply spring term for admittance as a full major in the art program despite the high credit requirements of the major. This application will be his one and only chance to avoid having to pick a different major; if he is denied he will have no choice but to switch majors to meet the NCAA’s academic progress guidelines.
“I just have to go to the art department and talk to them and show them a little bit of my work to get their recommendation and get in,” he said. “It should work out. Hopefully everything will go well.”
