	products recent interviews FastScripts archive about ASAP Sports

Our Clients:

Browse by Sport

Find us on

Subscribe to RSS

Click to go to
Asaptext.com

View our
e-Brochure

NCAA: STATE OF ASSOCIATION

January 13, 2011

Mark Emmert

MARK EMMERT: I know some of you were watching to see when Ed asked if those planning to retire would please stand up, whether I was going to stand.
(Laughter)
The fact is that I'm now in my 101st day on the job as your president. And I wanted to begin my comments by, first of all, thanking you. Thanking you for having confidence in me to offer me this position. Those on the Executive Committee who conducted the search had an extraordinary task, and that was to replace Myles Brand.
We were extremely lucky as an association to have Jim Isch ready and willing and able to step into the void and serve as our interim president. And for me that allowed the transition to go amazingly smooth. But, nonetheless, this is an incredible organization that serves our universities and our student-athletes so well. And for me, to get to serve in this leadership position is a great honor.
My wife, DeLaine, and I -- DeLaine is sitting right here by Jim -- we are very, very thrilled at this honor, and we appreciate it enormously.
So in this first 101 days, I have mostly traveled around the country. I've been to many, many meetings and associations. I've met with presidents and athletic directors and commissioners.
I've had, of course, a good many visitors in Indianapolis, and I've worked a good bit with our staff in Indy. And I've tried hard to find time to meet with student-athletes around the country as well.
And over the course of that time, I've heard about many, many issues, many opportunities, many challenges; and we all know that in our business there's no shortage of issues.
All you have to do is look at the program agenda for this convention and you realize that issues like advancing our academic progress rates or student well-being or the playing rules or the way we conduct recruitment, the format of championships, fiscal constraints, the growth of the membership, how we allocate our media revenues, et cetera, et cetera. It's a long list of issues that we're confronted with on a day-to-day basis.
And for me, I think we need to recognize that that's where the rub lies. The challenge is that we have all of these issues confronting us on a daily basis. The agenda can shift around from day to day. Some issues capture the imagination of the media.
Some of them are thrust on us by whatever the incidents of the day are. But we wind up like so many organizations and so much of society today being issues-driven, responding to issues and reacting, rather than thinking about where we want to be going and charting a course and following that.
We're susceptible to being whipsawed back and forth by the daily shifting that occurs from whatever happens to be coming at us in that moment.
What we need and what I want to talk about today is this need for greater clarity and commonality of purpose, so that we can constantly look back to what the association's really all about, and then we can stay focused on that.
We're always going to address the issues of the day and the problems that come at us. We have to do that. That's our jobs, for all of us.
But we have to do that by keeping our eyes on the values and the purposes that we all work for, the reasons why this organization was created and why it exists today.
And so one of the things that I'm especially pleased with Jim about is that when Jim was interim president, he and a number of presidents, the Executive Committee was involved and the President's Councils were involved in deciding that we needed to get together a group of people to start talking about how do we drive our decision-making by our values, by our core purposes.
And so we put together a group of presidents and commissioners and ADs and a variety of folks, and we started a conversation about just that: What should be the values that we use to drive our decisions? How do we stay focused while we're still dealing with all the issues de jure.
And what I want to do today is I want to talk about each of those values, the five values that this working group has come up with, and I want to use also some special visual aids, some instructional aids in making my points.
So let me start with the first value that I think is one that we can easily all agree on and make sense, and that I've been talking about since even before I started my job. And that is that we have to be focused as an organization, as an enterprise. We have to be focused like a laser on one thing, and that is the success of our student-athletes.
That's why this organization was created more than 100 years ago. We have to make sure that our student-athletes have a chance to be successful as student-athletes, successful in the classroom, and successful in life.
And I want to introduce now a video that makes this point beautifully, by talking about Ashley Karpinos, a former student-athlete who was a swimmer at Kenyon College, the 2003 Woman Of The Year for the NCAA and is now a physician at Vanderbilt University. Please join me.
(Video)
So Exhibit A, Ashley Karpinos. Ashley, tell everyone here today how your experiences, academic and athletic, at Kenyon College have helped you be so successful as a doctor and they've really helped you achieve all the wonderful things you've been able to do so far in your young life?
ASHLEY KARPINOS: Sure. Well, being a student-athlete at Kenyon, I definitely learned about managing my time effectively, working well in a team setting with others. But something that I really internalized that I've used in medical school and during my residency is that I learned to be constantly moving forward, to be engaged in a process of self-improvement and to be constantly working toward that next stage. So improving my skills.
In college, at Kenyon, that meant to be continually working on improving my skills athletically and academically. I always wanted to refine my stroke technique in the pool, to refine my race strategy, to improve my strength and fitness levels, and to really develop my critical thinking skills through science and humanities classes.
And now as a doctor at Vanderbilt, I'm in constant pursuit of improving my professional skills. So I'm always trying to refine my physical exam skills and my physical diagnosis, my procedural technique skills.
I always want to be able to improve my ability to integrate complex data into making the best diagnosis for my patients and coming up with optimal treatment plans for my patients.
So while I really learned to be constantly moving forward, I always remember something that my coach, Jim Steen, said. And he taught me to be content with where I am today while being in the process of continually moving forward.
Don't be at rest. Don't be stagnant. Move forward but be happy with where you are.
MARK EMMERT: You're certainly doing that. Share with us, also, if you could, what was it about athletics, compared to all the other opportunities and experiences you had at Kenyon, what was distinctive about athletics that really helped shape some of that as well?
ASHLEY KARPINOS: I think what I really learned from athletics, from swimming, was to make goal setting a continual process, and to make goal setting a habit and just a natural process.
So I remember coach would sit us down at the beginning of every season and would say where do you want to be in four years? Where do you want to be at the end of the season? Where do you want to be next month? And then he would help me translate that into what do I need to do today in the pool, what do I need to do today in the classroom to get there.
And that's something that I really learned from athletics that I've been able to use.
MARK EMMERT: That's wonderful. Ladies and gentlemen, Ashley Karpinos. Thank you very much, Ashley.
(Applause)
Well, what's the point? Well, the point is pretty obvious, that as we make decisions, as we set policies and guidelines and we go through our everyday activities, we need to recognize that we're all about trying to create more Ashley Karpinoses, trying to create experiences and opportunities so our student-athletes can be successful to strike that balance just as she did in her experiences at Kenyon College that are now allowing her to be a wonderful doctor for us all, and hopefully working in sports medicine some day soon.
So the second value that came out of this working group that I was really pleased with was to recognize that student-athletes are not professionals. They are pre-professionals, just like every other student at your university or college.
Now, we have all these definitional problems around amateurism. Indeed, there's a lot of confusion about what that word even means. It's widely debated. We have had lots of debates and discussions even in the media about what it means to be an amateur athlete.
But what makes sense to me, nice kind of level-headed way to approach this from my perspective, is to talk about and think about student-athletes as pre-professional, as people who are in training for what they will do in their life.
That's what all of our students are like. They are amateurs in one fashion or another, whether they're training to become an accountant, or a doctor, or anything else, they're pre-professional, and some of them happen to play sports.
So let me introduce now a second video and use my next instructive aid here and that's a video about Robert Griffin, quarterback of Baylor University, and a pre-professional who just happens to want to be a lawyer. Roll the video, please.
(Video)
(Applause)
MARK EMMERT: Congratulations.
ROBERT GRIFFIN: Thank you.
MARK EMMERT: Another exhibit. So for Exhibit B here, we've got Robert Griffin. So, Robert, you've got to tell us: What came into your mind when you decided I'm going to be quarterback of my football team; I'm going to finish my Bachelor's degree in three years. And before I'm done with my scholarship I'll have a Master's degree, and, oh, by the way, then I want to go to law school.
That's not a normal train of thought. Tell us what that was all about.
ROBERT GRIFFIN: No, it's not a normal train of thought. It's just one of those things that happened. They told me I had an opportunity to graduate in three years, so I took that opportunity because not very many people get to do that.
And with my parents, I love them, and I thought it would be great if I got two degrees based from my scholarship rather than having them pay for it.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
MARK EMMERT: Those are words that every parent wants to hear.
(Laughter)
And to prove it, Robert, I think your parents are in the audience.
ROBERT GRIFFIN: Yes, they are.
MARK EMMERT: Where are your parents?
ROBERT GRIFFIN: Right there.
MARK EMMERT: Would you please stand up so we can congratulate you on this wonderful young man.
(Applause)
ROBERT GRIFFIN: Stay standing. I wanted to say to you all, I love you all, and thank you for everything you've done. Dad, you can get up. And unfortunately I decided not to go to law school, so you'll have to comment on that one.
I'd also like someone else to stand up, Rebecca. This is my fiancee. These three individuals, through my grueling rehab for my ACL surgery, they were there every day for me to make sure I had everything I ever needed. Took me to the bathroom, made sure -- I know. Fixed me food and everything. I mean, I was pretty much riding in the back of the cars everywhere and they were carrying me around. So I want to thank you guys for that.
MARK EMMERT: Thank you.
(Applause)
MARK EMMERT: So, Robert, we also understand that you want to be an attorney some day when you're done playing football. But how would you describe athletics as preparing you to get ready to do something other than sports, to become a lawyer some day?
ROBERT GRIFFIN: As a football player, you have to be tough. You have to be tough. And that's the one thing that I can say that football has done for me, has allowed me to be a tough person. Going through that ACL rehab, even within there it was still hard. But I was able to mentally be tough and get through it. Goal setting, all that stuff, it all helps you. And to move into the professional stage in something other than athletics is a great thing.
I always like to say I have two plans, a plan A and a plan B. Plan A would be go to law school after I finish my communications degree. And plan B would be to go to the NFL. So plan B works out, it's fine. But I've always got plan A.
(Laughter)
MARK EMMERT: Ladies and gentlemen, Robert Griffin. That was great.
(Applause)
So what's the point there? Besides the fact that he's got great parents and a great fiancee that help him out, as we all do, we need help from people all around, it's that our slogan of the fact that the NCAA has 400,000 students who will go pro in something other than sports is in fact true.
It's more than just a cliche. It's what really is going on for our student-athletes and Robert and so many others are living proof of it.
So the third value that this working group came up with is to recognize the notion that we have to collectively, we have to find a way to provide as many opportunities for as many student-athletes to participate in sports as we possibly can.
You know, that's what we do in higher education over all. We provide in our universities and colleges a wide array of courses and majors and programs that we can participate in. Some get more attention than others. Some attract very large numbers of students and some just a handful.
But we understand that that whole complexity of what we offer inside a university or college is what makes up the whole. And just as what happens inside the classroom is the same thing that goes on out in the fields and in sports, we have to recognize that we have athletics that goes on in three different divisions across a wide range of sports.
Indeed, we, of course, have rules that say you're not going to just offer one or two sports to participate in our association. You've got to have a collection of them that provide a breadth of opportunities for as many student-athletes as you possibly can.
So I have another video I want to introduce that I think exemplifies this value very, very nicely. This is a video that comes from a student-athlete, Shippensburg University cross-country student-athlete and national champion Neely Spence. Please enjoy it.
(Video)
(Applause)
MARK EMMERT: Well, first of all, congratulations again on your victory in Louisville. I had the pleasure of being at the finish line. That scene in the snow right there, I was standing there, I can promise you it was cold and nasty but what a great competition and a great championship. Congratulations.
NEELY SPENCE: Thanks.
MARK EMMERT: I want to talk about something that's very important to us that you should recognize about Neely. You heard she also won a sportsmanship award, which is true. I had the pleasure of presenting her with that award. But this goes back to earlier in the year last year.
Neely was running in a conference meet. She was trying to set a conference record, and while she was in the midst of that, she knew that there were only one or two other members of this meet who had a chance to run a time that would be good enough to qualify for the national championships and get that person into national championship competition.
And as she was running, she realized that one of her competitors from another school, she knew well, wasn't running fast enough to qualify. So she gave up on the notion of setting a conference record.
She slowed down, let the other person catch up with her, and paced her and talked her into running fast enough to finish, to meet the time to get into the national championship competition and did something that will be a life-long memory for both of them. So Neely, that was an amazing act. You have to tell us why you did that, what was that all about in your mind, and what a great thing to do.
NEELY SPENCE: Thank you. You know, President Emmert, it was just the right thing to do. She's a great athlete --
(Applause)

NEELY SPENCE: Thank you. You know, she's a great athlete. And I think it worked out great for both of us. We both met our goals. I was able to win the race and help my team win the conference championship, and she was able to qualify for nationals, and we went on to place first and third at the NCAA championship.
And I was just so excited to be able to be a part of her success story.
MARK EMMERT: Well, it was truly a remarkable example of sportsmanship, but to have you recognize it as just the right thing to do I think says everything we need to know about you and your values and your wonderful commitment.
Ladies and gentlemen, Neely Spence.
(Applause)

MARK EMMERT: So Neely's story exemplifies why we value broad based participation and support all three of our divisions and all the breadth of the opportunities we can provide young people.
I mean, what would it be like if we didn't have Neely Spence's story? It's because we support women's cross-country in Division II that she had that experience and we get to enjoy it as well.
So those stories, those three great stories are things that could easily have played out on any of our campuses. You all know, everyone in the audience knows similar stories of people achieving great things and going on after their years in college to become extraordinary men and women.
It's the story of the NCAA. I was asked, of course, what the state of the association was, since this is a State of the Association speech, what is the state of the association?
Well, all you have to do is look at those three young people. You call them out here on stage, and you hold them up and you say that's the state of the NCAA. That's what we do. That's why we're here. And that's an easy enough thing to say, well, if that's what the state of the association's all about, we're in pretty good shape.
(Applause)

MARK EMMERT: But now those in the audience that are particularly quick will have noticed that I said there were five values and we have two to go. So let me talk about the next two, which are in fact fundamentally different than the first two, because -- I mean the first three, because -- I'm not good at math either -- the first three, because they actually deal with the collective good more than the individual values that we see in our student-athletes.
The fourth value that was identified by this working group is the recognition that intercollegiate athletics is part of the fabric of higher education.
It's an integral part of what we know as American higher education. Sport is as we all recognize a huge force in American society. College sports, in particular, have a very special place in our society. People look at college sport differently than they look at sport in general.
But it is nonetheless a very strong influence on our communities, on young people, on our daily lives.
And that's equally true on our campuses and in our communities. For so many of our schools and colleges, intercollegiate athletics is the social glue that holds together that community. It's not only something that we get to enjoy when we go to athletic events, it provides our alumni, our friends, our families, the community in general, something to come together about, to celebrate.
It provides us with a focus of attention around the things that we care about and value. This value, though, is an interesting one, because it brings with it some obligations, some responsibilities for us as an association and as individual member institutions to be engaged back in that society.
We know that the media pays great attention to sport. Whether it's local or just the campus or broadly nationally and even beyond, but that attention also means that we are often held to higher standards.
What we do right and what we do wrong is seen in broader brush strokes than the rest of society. So we have to be engaged with our communities. We have to recognize that there are those who would like to push sports away from our campuses.
I've heard in these first 101 days a number of people asking me quite seriously, shouldn't athletics not be a part of the regular components of universities and colleges? Shouldn't we just create 501(c)(3)s and set them on the side and let them operate as independent entities? Or shouldn't they be somehow kept distant from the core of the academy?
I couldn't disagree more. I think that is exactly the worst instinct that we could possibly have. Where intercollegiate athletics is most valuable is when we pull it into and make it fully part of the fabric of the academy. It's how we justify supporting it with institutional dollars.
It's how we justify having it be part of the learning experiences of all of our student-athletes. We recognize it as an integral piece of an educational experience. We're unique in the world doing that. Only the United States does that. The other countries don't have systems like that.
It makes for a remarkable blend, and I was delighted to see that the working group put that on as one of the five values that they thought was so important.
And then the fifth value was one that I also think is particularly important and one that I want to spend a few more minutes on. That's the notion that we have to be dedicated to enhancing and sustaining the model of collegiate athletics.
You know, collegiate athletics is in so many ways different than other forms of athletic activity. It has its own model and its own values as we're talking about here.
It means that our student-athletes are student-athletes. They're not professional athletes. We're not talking about the minor leagues of baseball or the minor leagues of basketball. That's not our job. Our job is this broader role of supporting our student-athletes inside the context of an athletic environment so that the collegiate model becomes one that everyone can look at and celebrate and enjoy.
And when we have threats to that, we have to be very, very attentive. We have to recognize that this is not just about trying to run an enterprise; it's about protecting something that is very, very valuable to us.
And so in that context, I want to discuss the regulatory environment, the enforcement processes that we engage in, because in recent weeks -- and it just happens to be the season right now. But in recent weeks we've had a number of very, very high profile enforcement cases that you're all well aware of. They've been splashed all over the media and we've talked about them.
They've drawn an enormous amount of attention and even a fair amount of criticism. They've even had people questioning the values of the NCAA. And I want to say I understand those criticisms. I understand those concerns. I even understand the critiques.
And what we have to do as an association, we have to make sure that we can be as clear as possible about our values and about how they're reflected in our regulatory efforts and our rules.
So let me be really clear about some things that I think require some clarification. First of all, it's wrong for parents to sell the athletic services of their student-athletes to a university, and we need to make sure that we have rules to stop that problem.
And today we don't. We have to fix that. Student-athletes trading on their standing as star student-athletes for money or benefits is not acceptable, and we need to address it and make sure it doesn't happen.
Student-athletes are students. They're not professionals. And we're not going to pay them. And we're not going to allow other people to pay them to play.
Behaviors that undermine the collegiate model, wherever they occur, are a threat to those basic values, and we can't tolerate them.
If we believe in those values, the things that I'm talking about here today, we need to be ready to defend them. And if we don't, then we have to be ready to suffer the criticism that comes from not doing so.
So there's some things that we need to consider legislatively and procedurally to address some of those challenges. And many more that are out there that threaten the integrity of the collegiate model.
I think that there's four or five things that are already underway that are going to have a significant impact, and I want us to make sure that we follow up on each and every one of these.
First of all, we've begun a conversation to find ways to better manage the third-party influences in recruiting, including the role of relatives.
We have to find a way to manage that problem clearly and unequivocally so that people know where we stand and what we'll tolerate and what we won't.
We have to review and make public who gets to play in Bowl games and NCAA championships, where there have been rules violations and what our principles are going to be so that everyone knows them and they don't wind up second-guessing us when we make such choices.
We need to make sure that we're addressing issues of academic fraud in a way that upholds the integrity of the academic processes and that we all recognize as fair and equitable.
We have to find more consistent practices for how potential violations are reported to the NCAA by institutions and by conferences and do so in a timely fashion.
We have to understand -- and this is very challenging -- the need for student-athletes who are interested in professional athletics, to have constructive relationships with advisors and agents but still maintain their pre-professional status.
In the coming days, I'll introduce to the three presidential bodies a number of issues around these matters and begin a conversation about how we can address each and every one of them.
My hope is that by our April meeting we can develop a package of proposals that makes positive efforts to addressing these problems and others that may be surrounding it.
But I want to be also clear about this: Passing new rules alone doesn't fix any of those problems. We need to work with our coaches, our athletic directors, our student leaders, all those who have an understanding of how these issues play out on the ground so that we don't just worry about changing a rule, but that we change behavior.
We need to make sure that we line up behaviors with our values so that when we pass a rule it's not just a rule in words, it's a rule that goes down into the organization that we all know what we're trying to change, we all know the behaviors that we want to reinforce and we want to reward. I'm committed to doing that with you.
It's not easy, but it's work we have to get done. So we have to take those deliberate steps. We have to take strong measures to protect the collegiate model. Not because we just want to do that, but because that collegiate model is the basis upon which we do all of our good work.
And when it's attacked, when we have erosion of that model, it distracts us from the real work of the association. And that's what I want to conclude by talking about.
You know, I've been in my first few months asked to speak in a variety of forums about the business of intercollegiate athletics. I'm often asked what's going on in our industry. And I'm often told what we need to do if we want better ratings is to have a better product on the field.
And I really dislike all of that language. You know, it is true that we need to have good media contracts to generate revenue for the association. It is true that we want to make sure that the business side of our activities make good sense, that we're using resources wisely, that we're having the most professional approaches that we can bring to coaching and training and administration available to our student-athletes. But that's not the bills of athletics.
The business is what we just saw in those three student-athletes. The business that we're in is supporting students and helping them be successful. All the others things we do, the resources we generate, our concerns about having financial and physical resources available to all you to allow you to do your work, it's about that business.
So I'd like to ask our three students, are they still around? Are they back there? Where are our three student-athletes? Could you guys come back out? They may have gone home.
(Laughter)
Come on back out, please.
(Applause)

MARK EMMERT: Thanks. This is our business. This is the business that we're in, helping people like this be successful in all their endeavors.
I'd like to do something a little bit hokey, because I do that. The Virginia Tech people love that, right?
(Laughter)
So would all the current and former student-athletes in the audience please stand up? Current and former student-athletes. All stand up. Look at this. Right?
(Applause)

MARK EMMERT: That's our business. Right? That's what we really do. And so we're going to pay attention to all the issues and all the problems, but we need to work very hard to keep ourselves focused on the values that count, on the business that counts and making our student-athletes successful in all the things that they care about. That's what I'm committed to do with you. Thank you for entrusting that great responsibility to me. I really appreciate it all. And thank you so much for being here today. Good afternoon.

End of FastScripts

ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297