The National Collegiate Athletics Association, also known as the NCAA, has rules in place to help protect both coaches and student-athletes from being overworked. Some of these rules include a set number of hours that athletes can practice per week and off days where no athletically related activities can occur.
Unfortunately, a letter from the men’s basketball team during the 2022-23 season to the president of Wofford revealed that some of these rules were broken under the leadership of Head Coach Jay McAuley.
McAuley started as the schools head coach in 2019. Violations that happened while he was coaching were agreed to have been during his last two years as Wofford’s head coach, during the 2021-22 and beginning of the 2022-23 season, during which he resigned.
Players were often required to come in to practice or watch tapes at times that were reported to the school as being off days and requiring tapes to be watched after a loss on the road, both violations of NCAA rules.
At the time, Wofford did not have ways to monitor the athletic teams and prevent the violations that were happening, and it took the advocacy of the basketball team to draw the schools attention to what was happening.
The team sent a letter to President Nayef Samhat stating that they were no longer willing to play under McAuley, exposing McAuley’s actions, as well as advocating for themselves in the process.Wofford has worked with the NCAA since that point to come to the agreement of penalties that the school and McAuley will receive.
“Wofford College fully cooperated with the NCAA to reach the public negotiated resolution and respect the outcome,” said a representative of Wofford athletics.
For Mcauley, he received a show-cause order for two years. This means that if he is employed by a NCAA school in any division, the school would be required to impose many restrictions on McAuley’s coaching that could make it difficult for him to successfully coach a team.
For Wofford, the men’s basketball team received a year of probation, meaning that the team is subject to being monitored more heavily to make sure that the countable athletically related activities for the season are not violated.
To help monitor the team closely during this probation year, three student-athletes from the men’s basketball team will review the reports of the team’s activities each week to make sure they are correct.
There was also a $5,000 fine for Wofford, a pre-season on-court practice reduction of five days for the basketball team, from 30 days to 25, and two less hours of countable athletically related activities each week, from 20 to 18, though it was unclear if this last penalty was solely for the basketball team or for all sports teams at the school.
This ordeal should be seen as an opportunity by the college to put different policies and courses of action into preventing later violations of NCAA rules. The college will most likely develop other policies and procedures to ensure that athletes in other sports will not be subject to this treatment again.
The hope is that the college works on not only protecting their student-athletes, but also makes \ teams more secure and stronger, on and off the field.
