From the conference: NCAA educates on enforcement June 24, 2011
BOSTON – Julie Roe Lach, vice president of enforcement for the NCAA, took sports editors through the collegiate compliance process at the Enforcement 101 workshop at the ASPE summer conference.
Lach said that while the NCAA is striving to educate the media in the process of enforcement in light of high-profile cases at many schools, she does not expect open Committee on Infractions hearings in the near future because NCAA member schools have not expressed an interest in a more transparent process.
"I really don't," Lach said. "It's the membership's call. Honestly, I don't think the schools want to open that up."
Lach said the workshop was designed to give attendees a better understanding about the enforcement process, specifically who the enforcement staff is and how the process works.
The NCAA has "just under 50" employees on the enforcement staff, which investigates allegations of wrongdoing involving collegiate athletic programs. The enforcement staff presents findings to the 10-member Committee on Infractions, which decides whether to proceed with charging schools with NCAA rules violations and handles hearings on the charges. The five-member Infractions Appeals Committee hears appeals by schools which disagree with either the Committee on Infractions' findings or its punishments.
The enforcement staff processes about 25 major violations cases per year and around 4,000 cases of secondary infractions. It gathers information from confidential sources, self-reports from schools, media reports and anonymous reports. In a major violations case, NCAA investigators typically conduct 40 to 80 off-campus interviews, Lach said. An average major violations case takes about 11 months to investigate, she said.
Lach said the reason she does not expect more openness in the process is twofold: that open public hearings could have a chilling effect on witnesses, and that it would be unfair to bring scrutiny on individuals who might be cited for violations but found by the Committee on Infractions to be innocent of any wrongdoing.
Lach said the NCAA wants to dispel what she called the “common myths” that the NCAA is selective in what schools it chooses to investigate, that the process is unfair and that the enforcement staff and infractions committee members are the same people.
Tommy Deas is sports editor of the Tuscaloosa News.
