For at least one athlete, a federal district judge's ruling in Philadelphia earlier this week is opening doors.
Nickie Peters, a 21-year-old freshman, will compete for the Coppin State men's track team in two events today at a meet at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Two weeks ago, Peters was ineligible because of a combination of his SAT score and the U.S. equivalent of his grade-point average at a school in St. Vincent in the West Indies fell short of the guidelines of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
But things have changed with the recent court-imposed abolition of the NCAA's initial-eligibility standards. There's more anxiety for junior college coaches in Hutchinson, Kan., less pressure to perform on the big test for a pair of Montgomery County youths and the ability to compete for a half-miler like Peters.
"I'm very pleased, because I get to run," said Peters, who is trying to make his island's team that will go to the Pan Am Games. "I can't sit and wait. I'm a national athlete. If I can't run, I can't get the times and I can't run for my country."
He had been on the sidelines because, on the NCAA's sliding scale, his SAT score of 1,000 was 10 points shy of the requirement for athletes with a 2.0 GPA. He says his grades were better than that.
"Back home, my average would have been a 3.5 or something like that," Peters said. "I would have been competing long time ago."
Peters' ongoing dispute over the way his grades were translated became moot on March 8, when U.S. District Court Judge Ronald L. Buckwalter issued a court order stopping the use of standardized-test scores as an eligibility requirement for freshman athletes.
When Buckwalter turned down the NCAA's request for a stay of the ruling, that eliminated the standards.
"For the last few weeks, we've had no rule," NCAA spokeswoman Jane Jankowski said. "A lot of people have been calling us for guidance, and we don't have a lot of guidance to give them."
The NCAA is again in pursuit of a stay, this time in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The danger exists that Buckwalter's findings could be overturned. Coppin could be found in violation of NCAA rules. Peters could be declared ineligible again and forced into another bureaucratic tussle.
This presents only a small dilemma for Peters and the West Baltimore college.
"Any championships we win might have to go back," Coppin State athletic director Fang Mitchell said. "This is basically an individual sport anyway. Any awards he wins might have to go back, the young man is well aware of that. It's important that we made him aware of what the consequences could be."
As Peters runs, Jamison Brewer and Eric Willis, a pair of point guards from Newport Prep in Kensington, take the SAT today. Their coach, Chris Chaney, vouches for their diligence in the classroom. But because schools like Auburn, Miami and St. John's are recruiting them, days like these would be make or break under the old rules. Now, they're not.
"They both know [about the ruling], but both had been preparing real hard with an SAT tutor," Chaney said. "We're telling them to go on as usual. Both came up to me and said, 'No matter what, I'm going to get the SAT.' They feel confident."
In years past, players like Brewer and Willis -- if they fall short of that SAT score -- might have ended up in Hutchinson, where the finals of the national junior college tournament will be played tonight.
But the opinions mix on the subject of what might happen to two-year programs that have seen an influx of talented players who must wait for the opportunity to play at a major college.
"It's going to hurt us a lot. If that sticks it's going to hurt our recruiting," said Bob Kirk, the coach at Allegany Community College in Cumberland who has coached two NBA first-round draft picks and sent Steve Francis to play at Maryland. "I would never name names, but there are some kids we wouldn't have had if the rules weren't what they are now."
Others believe that while the elimination of standardized tests as a criteria would thin the talent pool for freshmen, the two-year schools will still have a role to play.
Of the 12 players he took to the national tournament, Dixie (Utah) College coach Jeff Kidder said he had one player who would have gone elsewhere.
"The pool of the players at the high level will shrink somewhat," Kidder said. "There's a lot of different reasons why kids are in JCs. Out of those six [non-qualifiers on his team], only one would have qualified with this ruling. The other ones, the grades were so dramatically low that they wouldn't have been admitted with this ruling. But the mid-to-high level players who are on the borderline, we aren't going to get those kids."
Pub Date: 3/20/99