Opinion: NCAA drops the ball on assault
MINNEAPOLIS – Every day, the NCAA puts women at risk.
The organization that will nitpick to death who bought an athlete a hamburger and will parse grade-point averages down to the hundredth of a percent has no problem allowing rapists, stalkers and domestic abusers on its member campuses or welcoming them to their athletic teams.
That’s right. Rape a woman, even a fellow athlete, and there are no repercussions.
You can still play sports; you can even get a scholarship for doing so.
It’s a message as horrible as it is inexcusable, given the sexual assault scandal at Baylor.
Yet the NCAA doesn’t care.
If it did, it would change its rules. “It’s not like the NCAA isn’t aware of what’s going on. The question is why aren’t they doing anything? They’re willfully doing nothing with this,” said Brenda Tracy, who has become the most prominent advocate against sexual violence in college athletics after being gang raped by then-Oregon State football players in 1998.
“For me, it’s starting to feel like the NFL. ‘We don’t care about this issue. It’s not important enough for us to do something about it.’ ”
Tracy and Cody McDavis, who played
basketball at Northern Colorado and is now in law school at UCLA, have been lobbying the NCAA to change its rules. They want anyone who has been either convicted of a crime of sexual violence
or abuse or punished by a university for the same to be prohibited from playing college athletics. They also would be barred from receiving athletic scholarships.
This should be a no-brainer. While people deserve second chances, nowhere is it said that anyone has the right to an athletic career. If you abuse someone, physically or sexually, you forfeit your right to extracurricular activities.
But the NCAA would rather hide behind legalities instead. Asked Thursday why such a policy hasn’t been adopted yet, NCAA President Mark Emmert blathered on about how the legal standards and definitions vary across the 50 states.
“The commission that the (Board of Governors) put together … found it impossible to sort through all of those differences to treat everyone fairly in those processes,” Emmert said.
Except the Big Sky Conference has exposed that for the lame excuse that it is.
Last June, the Big Sky adopted a Serious Misconduct Rule, which prevents “anyone with a history of convicted violence to receive athlete-related financial aid or participate in practice and competition.”
The Big Sky, it’s worth noting, has member schools in 10 states, all of which I’m assuming have at least slight differences in their laws. If it can find a way to make this work, the NCAA can, too. And it should.
“I think it’s going to continue to be a debate,” Emmert said. “I actually hope it continues to be a debate because it’s a very important subject.”
Just not important enough to actually do something that would protect women.