October 22, 2008

NCAA Compliance

Stanford Athletics and the Fast Break Club complement their support of women's basketball by linking to each other's website. Both are required to observe NCAA Recruiting Rules.

It was recently brought to our attention that we failed to comply with two rules.

We linked to articles about prospective student athletes who had verbally committed to Stanford. We are not allowed to write about a recruit until she has signed a Letter of Intent. This usually happens during the early signing period, which this season is Nov 12-19, but may be done as late as May 20, 2009. We have removed such entries from the FBC Recruiting blog.

We linked to websites of recruiting services -- services that evaluate and provide information about recruits' potential. This is not allowed because it implies endorsement of those services. Two such services are HoopGurlz and scout.com (The Bootleg). We have removed all links to recruiting services, including entries in the FBC Recruiting blog and the FBC Interview blog. Much to our regret, the latter included links to Sue Bair's excellent interviews with various team members, which were posted in The Bootleg. Her interviews do not violate NCAA rules, but our linking to The Bootleg did.

We regret the need to restrict the content of our website, as you, perhaps, regret the need to restrict your contact with prospective athletes. But, so be it. The NCAA Recruiting Rules are designed to prevent gross recruiting violations and are in the best interest of our recruits.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe it would be helpful to write an article about how to find recruiting status information: names of the sites you mentioned, use of Google searches, use of Google alerts, and the like. I'd also love to hear a Recruiting 101 from one of the Stanford coaches, similar to the Basketball 101 we've had in the past. Ken

Anonymous said...

I don't understand how this blog violated NCAA rules. You are not affiliated with Stanford in an official capacity, are you?

Marian Cortesi said...

The Stanford Athletic compliance department explains it thus:

We have to think of the FBC website as our own website (since they are a Stanford donor group and it is linked to our site). Because we can't link to any type of articles about recruits or include recruit interviews, names, verbal commits, etc, the FBC site cannot have links or recruit information either.