Jumping Through Hoops

Against David-vs.-Goliath odds and in the name of hundreds of black student athletes like themselves nationwide, two courageous 18-year-olds from Philadelphia sued the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. last week for denying them a sporting chance to make their collegiate dreams come true. The young plaintiffs’ class action suit, Cureton vs. NCAA, charges that the NCAA’s freshman eligibility rules discriminate against black student athletes.

The allegation is correct and the NCAA’s own research proves it.

Throughout his high school career as a track and field athlete, Tai Kwan Cureton, one of the plaintiffs, dreamed of “running with the best of ‘em” at the collegiate level. And his was no pipe dream, given that several top NCAA schools such as the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania State University, Boston College and the Naval Academy had begun courting Cureton in his sophomore year.

Indeed, Cureton became increasingly attractive to these universities because he proved himself to be not only swift of foot but strong in mind and character as well: an honor roll student for 2 1/2 years, an athlete for three years, president of the student government and president of his school’s peer-meditation services--all while working more than 30 hours a week at a local fast-food restaurant.

But despite such an outstanding educational record, the scholarship offers from premier universities vanished abruptly, as did Cureton’s hopes of competing against elite track-and-field athletes, all because he did not meet the NCAA’s minimum requirement of a 700 score out of 1,600 on the Scholastic Assessment Test.

Student athletes who don’t make the grade on the SAT are ineligible to compete or receive athletic scholarships during freshman year at top-ranked NCAA schools.

It wouldn’t have mattered if Cureton had held a 4.0 grade point average at the nation’s top high school. Four years of hard work and verifiable accomplishment in high school are negated by a 3 1/2 hour, multiple choice test. This policy defies common sense.

It also defies basic standards of fairness by discriminating against large numbers of minority students like Cureton. In the early 1980s the Educational Testing Service, which develops and administers the SAT, as well as nonprofit educational groups such as the Boston-based Center for Fair and Open Testing, asked the NCAA not to include SAT scores in its eligibility standards because the scores would have a disproportionately negative impact on minorities and might undermine the overall effectiveness of the effort to raise standards for athletes.

In its own study of student athletes admitted before the SAT requirement went into effect, the NCAA found that the rule would have rejected nearly half of all black student athletes who, in fact, went on to graduate from college.

The NCAA itself proved that its policy was--and is--verifiably locking out hundreds, if not thousands, of qualified minority students from the best NCAA schools.

NCAA leaders defend the policy, saying the latest research shows that graduation rates for black athletes have increased slightly in the past few years. This is true but very much besides the critical point: Large numbers of qualified minority students, like Tai Kwan Cureton, are being discriminated against.

Most disturbing is the way in which the NCAA has very effectively--if even unintentionally--made scapegoats of so-called “dumb jocks” in the name of restoring academic integrity to college sports. While academically unqualified high school seniors have undoubtedly been recruited and exploited in the past by NCAA athletic programs, the foremost problem undermining the integrity of college sports does not involve unqualified recruits. On the contrary, the problem involves colleges and universities uncommitted to seeing their recruits succeed academically.

In terms of time and energy spent, big-time college athletic programs all too often expect much more of their student athletes athletically than academically. Therein lies the real exploitation and hypocrisy: institutions of higher learning making scapegoats of impressionable and vulnerable 18-year-olds to cover up their own lack of educational and ethical resolve.