NCAA Division II swimming superpower Drury has been with big punishments after the school’s compliance office failed to correctly certify the eligibility of 50 athletes across 14 sports from the 2019-2020 through 2021-2022 athletic years.
Those athletes competed in 284 events across 14 sports, the results of which are all being vacated. Those sports are: baseball, men’s basketball, men’s cross country, men’s golf, men’s swimming, men’s soccer, men’s track and field, men’s wrestling, women’s bowling, softball, women’s swimming, women’s tennis, women’s track and field and
women’s volleyball.
On March 5, 2022, the Great Lakes Valley Conference (GLVC) office notified the institution
it had not submitted several NCAA eligibility checklists as required by the conference. Previously,
the GLVC sent multiple emails to the former compliance director requesting the eligibility
checklists and did not receive a response.2 At that time, the institution learned that not only did the
former compliance director fail to submit the eligibility checklists, she also failed to complete
them.
The NCAA has placed Drury Athletics on three years of probation starting with the 2023-24 academic year, fined the department $5,000 and Drury will vacate wins and records that occurred when student-athletes competed while ineligible.
Among the most significant of those vacations will be the men’s swimming & diving team’s 2021 GLVC conference championship and their 2021 NCAA Division II runner-up finish.
Individual finishes by ineligible student-athletes will also be vacated, though individual results from eligible student-athletes are retained. The Drury women, who also finished 2nd at the 2021 NCAA Swimming & Diving Championships, do not have to vacate that result, implying that the ineligible student-athletes that year were not on their NCAA Championship roster.
The specific student-athletes impacted have not been identified, though Drury is required to update their website to reflect the amended results and achievements of ineligible student-athletes.
When the NCAA vacates results, it does not replace the results or, for example, award victories to the losing teams. Instead, the placements just remain empty with no reallocation of trophies or records. Losing teams in contests where the winner is vacated retain the loss on their registers.
The department says that it will also continue to implement and conduct a comprehensive educational program on NCAA legislation and undergo an initial amateur and academic eligibility certification review during the length of their probationary period. Drury will remain eligible for NCAA championships going forward and can still host regional or national championship events.
The sanctions were part of a negotiated resolution process which has become recently popular in the NCAA. In these cases, the NCAA and the school agree on the fact, violations, level of violations, and penalties, and usually allows for faster resolution.
“We discovered this issue soon after I was hired at Drury, and we immediately worked to comply with the NCAA and the GLVC to address the issues at hand,” said Nyla Milleson, Vice President and Director of Athletics, who began her tenure at Drury on Feb. 21, 2022. “I understand the NCAA decision and we will continue to work through their guidelines to ensure this never happens again.”
The Drury men have won 12 NCAA Division II Swimming & Diving Championships, with the most recent coming in 2014. They were runners-up in 2015, 2017, 2022, 2023, and previously 2021. The Drury women have won 10 titles, more than any school in D2 history.
The article never states or implies that any of the athletes on these teams were ineligible. If this is the case, then all of these athletes are being punished for a paperwork violation. The NCAA needs to find the violator and make sure that no further violations are allowed to occur. The person responsible needs to be punished not the athletes.
The article does state that there were 50 athletes found to be not certified for eligibility, from all the programs listed above. Whether or not you believe that the names of the athletes should be publicly disclosed is up for debate, but I also feel that scapegoating the former compliance officer is a lazy take. Yes, that individual should find another career, but coaches can actually read a rule book and make sure the athletes they bring aboard can actually have a chance to be eligible. I think they were actually lucky that this was the punishment.
Genuine question, how is it scapegoating when it was clearly stated in this article and the one published by NCAA that it was the compliance officers fault for not submitting paperwork?
I’m not sure what coaches reading the rulebook has to do with this either. It is not an issue of athletes not being eligible due to not meeting some requirement, but because the final paperwork to allow them to become fully eligible was not submitted. If the paperwork had been correctly filed (the job of the compliance officer), then those 50 athletes would have been fine. I think this is may have been what the previous person was trying to say as well?
If you wish to believe that the ineligible athletes were merely a casualty of clerical missteps by the previous compliance director, that is a choice the reader gets to make since they do not have to disclose who, and why, the athletes were deemed ineligible. However, why have this as part of the negotiated settlement —
“The department says that it will also continue to implement and conduct a comprehensive educational program on NCAA legislation and undergo an initial amateur and academic eligibility certification review during the length of their probationary period.”
Based on this statement, is it possible that some (many, all) of the 50 athletes were actually ineligible due to the academic or amateurism standards? I feel every… Read more »
So what consequences does the useless, inept former “compliance director” have to suffer? At least name her, so she doesn’t eff over another school!
So…what was the old compliance director doing, if she wasn’t doing the compliance paperwork?
Looks like UIndy gets the GLVC title and moves up to national runner up.
“When the NCAA vacates results, it does not replace the results or, for example, award victories to the losing teams. Instead, the placements just remain empty with no reallocation of trophies or records. Losing teams in contests where the winner is vacated retain the loss on their registers.”
No surprise really – administrative malfeasance is a specialty there. They got pulled from US News college rankings a few years ago for misrepresenting enrollment so their spend per student would appear higher.
For some reason I can’t see their 2007 roster
“Losing teams in contests where the winner is vacated retain the loss on their registers.” This is a tough rule by the NCAA. Especially if the loss was a direct consequence of the ineligible athlete. “So sorry about the other team cheating, but keep the loss.”
What an incredibly well written and thoroughly researched article. It’s a shame that the former Compliance Director didn’t complete this. The importance of checking up on really important steps should never be taken lightly.