The Division I Board of Directors is moving ahead with proposals designed to enhance the academic performance of men’s basketball student-athletes, including one that would reduce the maximum number of contests and adjust the preseason practice schedule.

Actual legislative proposals the Division I Legislative Council will consider in January would codify three recommendations from the Basketball Academic Enhancement Group:

• A revised playing-and-practice-season model that reduces the number of regular-season games to 28 (or 26 plus a multiple-team event) and provides a “staggered” schedule for the start of team practice beginning October 1 (four of the eight allowable hours devoted to practice the first week, increasing to the current 20-hour week beginning October 15).
• A change in the counter status for men’s basketball student-athletes on athletically related financial aid who wish to stay at an institution after a coach’s departure but not participate in basketball. The proposal would allow student-athletes to remain on aid and graduate but not count toward financial aid team limits
• Not allowing more than two physical education credit hours to fulfill the two-year college transfer requirements (or up to the minimum number required for degrees in the subject).

Two additional recommendations are not yet in legislative form but will receive additional discussion, perhaps during an educational session at the 2010 NCAA Convention in Atlanta. Those recommendations are:

• A mandatory summer academic preparation and college acclimatization model that includes an assessment of all incoming freshmen and transfers and the requirement of appropriate support/summer school sessions. The proposal would allow student-athletes who enroll in a summer session the opportunity to practice with a coach. Schools without summer school would be exempt.
• The opportunity for institutions to pay for travel expenses to and from official visits for the parents or legal guardians of a men’s basketball student-athlete.

Additional discussion on these two recommendations will allow for fine-tuning to accommodate concerns expressed by faculty, coaches and administrators.

Some institutions are concerned about the summer school element being required even when academic performance of a school’s basketball team has been satisfactory. Others in the enterprise are concerned about the opportunity student-athletes would have to practice with a coach in the summer and the motivation behind that element of the plan.

The Basketball Academic Enhancement Working Group, which worked for nearly two years on its report, is a consortium of men’s basketball coaches, faculty athletics representatives, athletics administrators and college presidents formed by the late NCAA President Myles Brand to develop strategies to enhance the academic performance of men’s basketball student-athletes. This group of student-athletes has been among the lower-performing groups in the Academic Performance Rate, a real-time measure of the academic success of individual teams.