School agrees to vacate wins, take away scholarships after playing ineligible players.
By Jordan Littman / Special to The Malibu Times
Pepperdine University last week self-imposed scholarship reductions in five athletic programs and vacated wins in men’s volleyball, baseball and tennis from 2007-08 to 2010-11 after an investigation found the school played ineligible athletes.
The violations spanned the 2005-06 to 2010-11 academic years, and came to the attention of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) when Pepperdine self-reported them last year. On July 3, the NCAA released a 19-page report detailing the program’s violations, including the marking of 22 ineligible transfer student-athletes as eligible and giving student-athletes non-athletic scholarships without counting them toward team scholarship counts.
“We take our NCAA compliance very seriously, and it is important that we run our program in not only a compliant manner, but also an ethical manner,” Pepperdine Athletic Director Steve Potts said. “Once we discovered mistakes were being made, we reported them and corrected them.”
Detailed in the NCAA report was an independent examination of the program’s compliance department. That investigation revealed Pepperdine lacked sufficient manpower to handle NCAA compliance efforts, and that those already in power at the university were not educated enough in applying NCAA rules.
Since Potts took over as Athletic Director in January 2011, he said the program has made significant changes to their compliance effort. According to Potts, Pepperdine added a new Associate Athletic Director for Compliance and a second full-time staff member in the area of compliance. In addition, he said the university took on the task of educating all of the different student services departments on campus in their compliance role.
“The NCAA expects that not just the athletic department, but all the departments on campus that deal with student athletes have a good working knowledge of NCAA rules and the role they play in the process,” Potts said. “We strengthened our compliance staff, we strengthened our education across the board within the institution and will continue to do so.”
The NCAA report acknowledged that significant changes had been made within the Pepperdine athletic department; however, punishments were still at hand. When Potts and his staff members notified the NCAA about these violations, the university came up with their own punishments on themselves.
Such self-imposed sanctions included a 25-percent scholarship reduction per year over a four-year period for the baseball, men’s volleyball, men’s water polo and men’s tennis teams, a .88 scholarship reduction per year for women’s soccer team and the elimination of all wins and team accomplishments from the 2007-08 to 2010-11 seasons for the sports of baseball, men’s volleyball and men’s tennis.
The NCAA deemed these punishments to be appropriate, and placed Pepperdine on three years of probation through the 2014-15 academic year.
“We’re grateful to the NCAA for their thoughtful consideration and understanding of the situation we were involved in,” Potts said. “We appreciate their cooperation throughout the whole process, and I thought it was a fair and reasonable resolution to a very tough situation.”
Under the sanctions, Pepperdine must inform prospective student athletes for the five aforementioned sports who express interest in the school during the probation period that they are on NCAA probation. In addition, if these student athletes sign their National Letter of Intent to play for Pepperdine or take an official visit to the university, they must also be informed of the penalties their respective team faces.
The ruling places a damper on the school’s recent successes in sports such as baseball, which won the WCC conference this season and advanced to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2008.
“We knew we were going to have some sanctions against us, so all of our teams have already prepared for the NCAA result,” Pepperdine baseball head coach Steve Rodriguez said. “I think what is most impressive is the success all of our teams had this past year while we were already preparing for the sanctions.”
Despite this setback for the institution, Potts is hopeful that these sanctions the school must deal with will not deter future student athletes from considering Pepperdine University.
“I think we have a lot of great things going for us, and I don’t think the fact that we are involved in NCAA violations is going to keep people from going to Pepperdine,” Potts said. “I think the way we responded in fully cooperating with the NCAA says a lot about our institution.”