Sports Watch

By Bill Kwon

Thursday, December 19, 1996

NCAA exempt rule
doesn’t need change

HAVE you finished your Christmas shopping yet? Chaminade

University has ... for the next three years.

Chaminade has already lined up - with the help of Kemper Sports Marketing and ESPN - its Maui Invitational basketball field through 1999.

Joining the host Silverswords in Lahaina next year will be Duke, Arizona, Boston College, DePaul, George Washington, Kentucky and Missouri. The 1998 field includes Arizona State, Clemson, Indiana, Michigan, Syracuse and Utah. Among the teams visiting in 1999 are Georgetown, North Carolina and Memphis.

There's a reason Chaminade did its shopping early. It's concerned that the NCAA might further tinker with the exempt legislation.

"The thing is getting so convoluted," said University of Hawaii athletic director Hugh Yoshida. "There are so many different interpretations."

It was all so simple at the beginning until the NCAA mucked it up.

In 1954, the University of Hawaii asked the NCAA for a special exemption for colleges to play an extra game in football and basketball when they came here.

It was done to help geographically isolated Hawaii build an all-collegiate schedule. The extra game (or date) also gave visiting teams an incentive to come here.

SINCE then, there has been a proliferation of preseason basketball tournaments, among them the Maui Invitational.

UH-Hilo also entered the fray along with Alaska-Anchorage. Next year, Alaska-Fairbanks hosts its initial Top of the World Tournament. And BYU-Hawaii and Hawaii Pacific University figure to join the tournament mania once they pass their NCAA probationary status.

Complicating matters are some strictly money-making tournaments that also are exempt - the Preseason NIT, the Great Eight and the

four-team Martin Luther King Classic.

So in any given season, there are more than 70 schools - about one-fourth the number playing Division I basketball - competing in exempted tournaments. And that's not counting women's basketball.

It's out of control, according to Bill Trumbo, UH-Hilo's athletic director who has argued long and in vain about recent implementations to the exemption legislation.

First, the NCAA came up with a once-every-four-years plan for all tournaments with the idea of spreading the exemptions around. In other words, a team can play in the Rainbow Classic only once every five years.

Trouble is, an elite program such as Michigan can play in the Rainbow Classic this year, the Maui Invitational next year and maybe go north to Alaska in 1998. There are those who want to close that loophole.

NOW, the NCAA has implemented two additions to the exemption rule. A tournament can't have two teams from the same conference. Also, it must reimburse expenses.

The conference limitation sounds great ... on paper and if you're only talking basketball. But Yoshida is worried about the ramifications of those restrictions if they are applied to sports other than basketball.

Volleyball and baseball, both money makers here, could survive. But nonincome sports such as golf, swimming, soccer, softball or tennis would be devastated.

Yoshida has no problem with men's basketball, since more than 300 schools compete in that sport. But limiting a tournament to one team per conference would be inane in men's volleyball, for example, since only 22 schools field Division I teams.

So he's hoping that the NCAA at its annual convention next month in Nashville views the exemption ruling in the light of its original intent - that of helping member schools with their scheduling.