UMass hit hard by NCAA
Financial aid violations in men’s hoops, women’s tennis programs result in sanctions
Just when things were looking up for UMass athletics on the playing fields, the governing body of intercollegiate sports came down hard.
The NCAA Committee on Infractions (COI) on Friday found UMass culpable of unintentional violations in university financial aid distributions impacting student-athletes from its men’s basketball and women’s tennis programs.
UMass, in conjunction with Atlantic 10 Conference commissioner Bernadette McGlade, intends to appeal the imposed penalties that includes vacating all wins and championships accumulated by the two sports from 2014-17.
59 wins by the men’s basketball team would be vacated, along with an Atlantic 10 championship for women’s tennis.
“I think in this case certainly not only the wins, but in a matter like this I worry about protecting our brand and worry about protecting our men’s basketball and women’s tennis brands,” said UMass athletic director Ryan Bamford during a Zoom press conference.
“Especially in a case like this where those programs, those coaches and those student-athletes had nothing to do with these violations. I struggle with the fact they are going to be impacted.
“The vacation of records and vacation of wins doesn’t take away the experience that the women in our tennis program had winning an A-10 championship and the amount of wins they had along the way.”
The NCAA found there were 13 unintentional and inadvertent violations in the issuance of financial aid above the cost of attendance. The “administrative errors” affected 12 student-athletes, 10 from basketball and two from tennis.
The 13 financial overages from 2014-17 totaled $9,000. UMass officials do not dispute the infractions happened, but that administrators, coaching staff and student-athletes were not aware of the violations.
Bamford cited an outdated overage as an example of where some of the money went. Six of the basketball players and both tennis players received financial aid to install land phone lines in their off-campus housing. The infractions were ongoing when Bamford replaced John McCutcheon as the school’s AD on March 24, 2015.
UMass self-reported the violations and was proactive in engaging the NCAA and outside counsel and worked collaboratively to thoroughly access athletics compliance efforts and remedial measures.
Despite all the measures taken by the university to rectify what it considered a “minor administrative error,” the NCAA imposed a two-year probation, a $5,000 fine and the vacation of records in the two sports, the latter of which will be the main focus of the appeal.
“We really truly feel like we’ve had something taken away and it’s just not fair and we’ll challenge for certain,” said Bamford. “We looked at 619 financial aid records and only had 13 over awards in a five-year period.
“It was inadvertent and it was unintentional.”
Since the problem was reported to the NCAA in 2017, the university and the athletics department has enacted corrective measures and reviewed relevant policies and protocols for athletic compliance.
“The unfortunate error in our operational processes has led to a comprehensive review of our procedures for setting and distributing athletic scholarship aid,” said Bamford.
“We have updated our procedures, invested in new compliance software and added a fulltime position in student financial aid services to assist our department in monitoring the financial aid distribution process.”