In an NCAA survey of nearly 50,000 Division I college coaches, athletics administrators and student-athletes, respondents dissected how college athletes spend their time and offered feedback on how to ensure the demands of academics, competition, practice and travel are managed fairly.
The vast majority of respondents – 44,058, or 89 percent of respondents – were Division I college athletes.
The survey identified several areas of consensus in which college athletes, coaches and administrators agree. Those include:
- Requiring a minimum of eight hours overnight between countable athletically related activities periods.
- Mandating a no-activity period at the end of the competition season received strong support from athletics administrators and student-athletes. Overall, a majority of coaches also support this concept; however, within some sports, a majority of coaches did not support this idea.
- Maintaining the requirement of a minimum of two days off per week out of season.
- Allowing student-athletes to take a period of no activity outside the playing season to participate in an educational or career development opportunity. (A majority of college athletes and coaches would prefer this opportunity be limited to two to four weeks).
- Limiting the number of contests during exam periods.
The findings put the Division I Council, along with the Division I Student-Athlete Advisory Committee and the Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and Southeastern conferences, one step closer to addressing the time demands of Division I sports on student-athletes.
“The Council’s commitment to enhancing and improving the undergraduate experience for our student-athletes, on and off the playing surface, is as strong as it’s ever been,” said Jim Phillips, Council chair and vice president for athletics and recreation at Northwestern University. “Our young men and women continue to respond to our inquiries in staggering numbers to help inform and guide our decision-making. The results of this survey will allow us to consider feedback from administrators, coaches, faculty representatives and, most importantly, the student-athletes, in order to help determine the best course of action moving forward.”
The survey comes in the wake of the Council’s February meeting, where members discussed taking a thorough, methodical approach that included input from Division I athletics directors, senior woman administrators, faculty athletics representatives, coaches, compliance officers and others. The survey assessed a range of concepts proposed to play a role in ensuring student-athletes have the time needed to balance their lives and succeed academically, athletically and socially.
Since the Council was created last year as part of a restructuring of Division I, improving the student-athlete experience has been among its goals.
The survey, conducted online in February and March, included sport-specific questions and identified potential solutions for various concerns including countable athletically related activities, competition time demands, out-of-season time demands, academics and travel.
Results from the Council-sponsored survey supplement data from the 2015 NCAA Growth, Opportunities, Aspirations and Learning of Students in College study and the December 2015 Division I SAAC survey, which helped spearhead the conversation on time demands and identify potential areas of improvement. The initial findings from those surveys were discussed at the 2016 NCAA Convention in January. As part of a resolution adopted by the autonomy group at the Convention, the topic of time demands was referred for further study, which led to the recent collaboration.
Dustin Page, co-chair of the Division I SAAC, is a recent graduate of Northern Illinois University who played soccer as an undergraduate and is now a law student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said he is encouraged by the record number of responses student-athletes provided for both time demands surveys and believes student-athletes have collectively identified target areas for Division I to consider.
“The recent Council-sponsored time demands survey represents the next step forward in tackling one of the biggest problems facing Division I athletics right now,” Page said. “The feedback that the division has received from student-athletes, coaches and administrators will serve as the platform for proposals to come in the next legislative cycle.”
The Council and five conferences with the ability to propose and adopt rules in many of the areas touched by the survey will base future proposals on its results. The division plans to bring forward a number of proposals in this area for a vote at the 2017 NCAA Convention in Nashville, Tennessee. Additional proposals will be introduced in future legislative cycles.
Legislative concepts must be submitted to the national office by Sept. 1 for consideration in the 2016-17 voting cycle.
Above Press release courtesy Tom Yelich, NCAA.org.
I have never swam in my life…….drove to thousands of practices and meets though….lol. I have tremendous respect for the college swimmer and coaches. My daughter moved1600 miles to the west coast for an incredible division 1 team. From a parents perspective, I am impressed with how organized the team fits all the aspects of academics and training into a fairly restricted training season. This may not be the right post for this article. But, I want to share how much parents respect the effort. Most students can’t graduate in four years without all the challenges from a div 1 athletic commitment. The challenges of life are so difficult once you start a family!!! While you are in college work… Read more »
Best advice that too few from my generation listened to: have a 5 year plan for college if you are a scholarship athlete. Or commit to two summers. To take 12 hours instead of 15 during the heavier training and season where team travel will take you away from class for some days is a great relief on the duress factor. You’ll be a better student and a happier student athlete.
Some of it has to do with a lack of understanding of countable hours.
Days of competition only count as 3 countable hours, even if they are all day or have a travel component. Study hall and team activities (fundraising, community service etc) count as 0. I’ve been accused of going over, and we had 15 countable hours for the week.
They should propose reinstating the freshman ineligibility rule (eliminated in 1968, basketball & football 1972). While many will argue that it deprives freshman of the right to compete, that is not true, it allowed for limited competition. This rule allowed freshman to make the transition to college without the excessive burdens of varsity team competition and travel. The freshman focus was clearly on academics and it set the proper tone for the next three years.
I think there is a great place to do less and be more focuses on academics…..
It’s called NCAA Div III.
Allow the high focused athletes train and study at a high level, and for the others that don’t, they have to realize that maybe DI athletics isn’t your fit.
“But I want to be at a top athletic school….. Just want the bar lowered so my mediocrity can be the forced accepted levels”
This is not only offensive, but downright rude. Athletes are not looking for shortcuts. They are not looking for an easy way out. We are looking tone successful in the pool and in the classroom. Who says athletes should be forced to choose between an education and a focus on athletics? Tell that to student athletes at Cal, at Princeton, or at any major university for that matter. If you have the athletic ability to swim D1, you also have to be committed to schoolwork. A commitment to the classroom does not fall by the wayside just because you choose a D1 program.
This issue is not about slacking off. It’s about maintaining a balance. It’s about giving athletes… Read more »
Let’s leave Division III put downs out of this discussion. My kid achieved a 3.9 GPA as a business major, made the Dean’s List while swimming 9 practices a week….he is also a National Champion! NO consideration given for midterms while he was at NCAA’s…in between swims he went back, as did most of the Emory team, and study instead of sleep…do not tell me HE or HIS TEAM are any less of a student/athlete than ANY Division I team. Just check out the GPA of the Emory team and check out Olympic hopeful Andrew Wilson…his academic accomplishments while at Emory are stellar. I will concede that out of season these swimmers do not put in the same practices as… Read more »
I don’t think Div III athletes put in less effort, it’s that there is substantially less pressure on them to perform…and as you pointed out, there are fewer off-season demands on their time. With that being said, Div III athletes can (but don’t necessarily) load up academically in the off season and go lighter during season. For Div I athletes there is practically no down time and a tremendous amount of pressure to perform. It’s a demanding lifestyle that isn’t for everyone.
Quite frankly, I think that Div III athletes are the epitome of what one would traditionally consider to be a “student-athlete” and that’s meant as a compliment. Outside of the Ivy League, most of your top-notch schools opt… Read more »
Well said. I could not agree more.
I dont understand the comments section on this website anymore, it just seems to be a lot of sarcasm and unrelated comments that do no aid with the reading or understanding of an article…just disappointing 🙁
Survey of the SwimSwam comment section reveals desires for people to get off their lawn.
And millennials who would rather click an up arrow or down arrow than leave a reply.
no no no, you’ve got your “get off my lawn” messaging confused. Millennials would rather “leave a reply on an internet forum” than actually get out on the streets and effect change. I think that’s the latest I hear.
how in the world did any of us old guys and gals student-athletes ever survive when there were NO practice limitation rules, no boo-hooing about balancing fairly academics, athletics, competition, etc? right, I forgot, we weren’t coddled, spoiled, “it’s all about me” whiny punks like MANY, not all, student-athletes are today. here’s a news flash, the real world is rarely if ever balanced fairly. Wait until you have a child up all night throwing up from chemo treatments and you still have to go to work in the morning because your other child(ren) still need to eat, have a place to live, want/need your love and attention as well.
A. Less schoolwork
B. Less competitive job environment
C. They’re kids. Lighten up.
Also: do the math. If a kid is taking 15 credit hours, that means that they should be spending ~60 hours/week on school. Add in 20 hours/week alone for workouts and you’re already at 80 hours/week spent in the pool or in the books. That’s not exactly “nothing to whine about”.
1. We didn’t have less school work
2. The job environment has ALWAYS been tough
3. No, college athletes aren’t kids. They are 18+, meaning they are legally adults who can vote, go to war (and be trained to fire a weapon and kill people), drive a car, get married, go to jail,. It’s a somewhat over-used comparison but the majority of men that stormed the beaches and skies of Normandy in 1944 were, by your definition, “kids”…roughly the same age group. Did the Germans “lighten up” on them because of that? No, I didn’t think so. Get a clue.
Annnddd Godwin’s Law wins the day.
Nope, nope, nope. I didn’t invoke Nazis, Hitler or their ideology. I could’ve just as easily used WWI or Vietnam. There’s a BIG difference there. Godwin’s Law would’ve been invoked had I said something like Div I coaches are worse than Hitler.
I think you invoked Godwin’s Law by mentioning it. 😉
Would Godwin’s Law have been invoked if I’d instead chosen to use the Marines who stormed the beaches of Okinawa? I think not and essentially the same thing.
There’s almost always a better analogy to be made than the Nazis. So saying “I could’ve used a different example” doesn’t mean Godwin’s Law doesn’t apply.
Point being is that I wasn’t purposely going with Nazis because they are Nazis. I picked a f’in horrible situation where the participants were about the same age as college students.
Wikipedia defines Godwin’s Law as when “sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism.” I did neither. I just said that young men the same age as college students were tasked with undertaking a hellish mission, so to say college students are “kids” lighten up, is silly. Nazis were tangentially part of the analogy, not central to it and I compared nothing to them. What I was comparing was college students conditions to the conditions during D-Day.
But if you want to think… Read more »