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Sidelines Kalani Simpson |
BYU eligible to share
Hawaii’s pain
IT seems that Hawaii is not the only school at a loss at how to handle foreign student-athletes and their roles in regard to NCAA eligibility rules.UH has had a well-documented list of headaches, as you know. Basketball players having to sit out games unexpectedly. A men's volleyball national championship won, then, later, thanks to a foreign player's ineligibility, a banner brought down.
Well, now here comes more NCAA men's volleyball eligibility news. Hawaii is not the only school having trouble keeping close enough track of this problem.
BYU -- have you heard of BYU? -- found out last month that its reigning national player of the year, Carlos Moreno, is already all pau.
Mere days before he was to take the court for the first exhibition matches of what was to be his senior season, Brigham Young's star player got the news: His career had in all likelihood ended here last spring, when the Cougars won the national title at the Stan Sheriff Center and he was the final-four MVP.
He just hadn't known that was the end, and neither had anyone else.
The story has been pretty quiet, considering this is the national player of the year we're talking about. But then, it's men's volleyball.
It's also kind of embarrassing.
So what happened? Was he a pro?
No.
Not even a dubious, unlikely, unfounded question of it, as there was in Hawaii's case, when that national championship banner came down.
No, this one was simpler, and, some might even say, more stupid.
He was an "international transfer" student-athlete, from Brazil. And so he had never taken the SAT or ACT.
This made him an academic non-qualifier.
This meant he had only three years to play sports. As with all academic non-qualifiers, he'd be granted a fourth year of eligibility only if he's on schedule to graduate in four years or less. He isn't. Thus, three-and-out.
All very black and white. No surprises here.
But apparently BYU and its crack compliance staff may not have been exactly on top of that particular rule or Moreno's academic progress, or both.
We know this because he was being touted as a returning player right up until a week before the Cougars' first preseason matches last month.
Apparently Carlos Moreno had no idea about any of it.
We know this because of an e-mail his mom wrote to BYU coach Tom Peterson, which she also sent to a handful of media outlets, including me.
(Why did she send it to me? I don't know. Maybe she was also moved to write after the 69-3 column.)
She lamented his lost chance to say a proper good-bye, as a senior should. She said he would have understood the situation, had he known it, but was devastated at the way his athletic career had been yanked out from under him.
"We, his family, couldn't understand why this rule didn't work last year, and why the responsibles of it didn't pay attention to it," Selma Moreno wrote.
Good question.
Some of us were asking the same thing when Hawaii's banner came down.
I DON'T ENVY compliance departments. I say right up front I am not smart enough to understand any of this NCAA stuff. I wouldn't know the rule book from the phone book. But that's me.
It's not my job to know it.
We've been told that some of this is too complicated to track.
"That's just how they do things over there," is the refrain when it comes to European athletes' "club" team experience and all the pro, semi-pro, quasi-pro eligibility questions that come from that system and why trouble keeps coming up.
It must be very complicated, because too many times UH's compliance department has been unable to connect the dots in time.
Now, after all that heavy-handed criticism, it turns out that Hawaii isn't the only one.
So, to paraphrase a Sean Connery line from "The Untouchables": Do you feel better? Or worse?