SwimSwam has partnered with Brad Barnes to bring our readers a new, occasional feature focusing on NCAA compliance. Brad is the Assistant Athletics Director in charge of Athletic Compliance at Texas A&M University and has been an invited speaker at the National Association for Athletics Compliance convention. You can follow his journey through the complex world of NCAA compliance on Twitter @TAMUCompliance.
If you’re a successful youth swimmer, then, depending on how successful and where you’re located, you might have the opportunity to accept prize money, endorsements, free equipment and/or apparel, and financial support from various sources for swimming, and that’s great, but if you want to preserve the opportunity to participate in NCAA swimming or diving as a student-athlete, then you need to contact the NCAA compliance staff of an NCAA member institution that is recruiting you or in which you are interested, provide them with all the facts, and wait for an answer on what you may accept/do and under what conditions. It may not be fun. It may even take a while for you to get your answer, but your patience will be rewarded with the info you need to protect your options as a potential NCAA student-athlete. While not all pre-enrollment violations of NCAA amateurism rules have serious consequences, some do. Making agreements with or accepting benefits from a sports agent or sports marketer, signing endorsement deals with swimming apparel or equipment manufacturers, etc., or accepting significant amounts of prize money in an annual period that exceed your annual actual and necessary competition expenses can have serious consequences for your potential NCAA eligibility. In short, before you dive in to the pool, check out how deep the water is.