AAU IS QUIETLY UNDER ATTACK PT. 10 - ALL-MET ELITE

AAU IS QUIETLY UNDER ATTACK

PT. 10

 

The following are excerpts from the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship: Final Four Press Conference on 3-29-18 featuring Dr. Mark Emmert, president of the NCAA, Dr. Eric Kaler, president of the University of Minnesota and chair of the Division I Board of Directors, and Dan Gavitt, NCAA senior vice president of basketball.

 

 

Mark Emmert " Summer ball, whatever you want to call that, but summer ball is a wholly unregulated space. There's nobody right now that really has oversight over it. And I think that's at least part of the problem. Everybody seems to agree to that.

So whether that means we move into that space or USA Basketball moves in or even the NBA itself moves in in some different ways, there's doubtlessly going to be some combination of changes there that can occur that can work with, not in opposition, but with some of those organizations that are there now to make it function much better for young people.

So I think in each of those spaces, there's going to be need for us to modify what we're responsible for and to move some things that are kind of under the table now up on top of the table and say, yeah, we know those things exist, so how do we manage them more effectively and make it work better for all parties"

 

Eric Kaler "You could pretty easily see the autonomy five conferences going in one direction with the resources they have and disadvantaging competitively smaller school teams as well as not providing the opportunity for those schools to see players from around the country, which is what summer ball, if we call it that, can do.

So we have to think carefully about serving all of the D-I schools but at the same time getting a clear set of rules and a clear set of expected behaviors"

 

Mark Emmert "Also as an aside you mentioned the Pac-12's proposals. It's important to know, and there's no reason that the broad public would know this, the commission's been soliciting input from all the conferences, from a whole array of constituents and interested parties and they've received a ton of it. Some of that's come out to the public but the vast majority hasn't. The Pac-12 published theirs. The Big East has announced some of theirs. Others have been doing it directly without making it public"

 

 

Dan Gavitt "Including the NABC, which is important to note"

Mark Emmert "Yeah, basketball coaches, lots of groups"

 

Mark Emmert "And I mean just to be blunt about it, you don't waste Condoleeza Rice's time if you're not serious about it. Most importantly, though, it isn't who is on the commission, and it isn't even about what their recommendations are going to be; it's about the commitment of Eric and his colleagues, about what I've heard from the coach's association, about what I've heard from the basketball oversight committee. Everybody that's involved in college basketball right now recognizes this can't continue the way it's continuing"

There's more motivation and focus on this than any issue that I've seen in my time in college sports. And it's easy to forget that the NCAA is a collective decision-making body. It is a representative democracy. And when you've got collective decision-making, you need strong catalysts to move things forward. Sometimes those catalysts come in the form of very ugly incidents, and that's what we've got here"

 

 

Mark Emmert "On April 25th Eric and his colleagues will receive a report of the commission. The commissioners -- there will be commissioners in attendance -- they'll spend as much time as necessary discussing their recommendations and findings with the board. And the intention is that the board will then take those recommendations, working with the rest of the NCAA governance structure and move forward to address those issues before tip-off next season"