RULE-BOOK CRACKS

Sometimes there are cracks in the system. Sometimes the cracks are so large that things fall through them. Sometimes the cracks swallow entire human beings.

That pretty much describes the situation of one Mark Thompson, a freshman at Southeast Missouri State University. Thompson came to Cape Girardeau from New Castle, Ky., where he graduated from Henry County High School. He had his sights set on being a college basketball player, and it looked like he would succeed.

Until the National Collegiate Athletic Association stepped in.

The NCAA has lots of rules about the sports it sanctions. Most of those rules are intended to level the playing field -- literally, not just figuratively -- for students involved in college sports. One of those rules is known as the NCAA's Proposition 48, which deals with academic standards for college athletes.

Mark Thompson was well aware of Proposition 48. He didn't try to get around the rule or dupe the system. All he did was go to school, get passing grades and get a high enough score on the ACT to meet NCAA requirements.

But there were some cracks. The first crack was communications problem. Small Henry County High, which doesn't see a whole lot of its athletes go to Division I colleges, thought it was doing what the NCAA wanted, and that is what school officials told Thompson. But it turns out that one high school class Thompson took didn't meet the requirement for a core course as required by the NCAA. The school thought it was OK. Thompson thought it was OK. But after considerable bureaucratic red tape, the NCAA decided the high school had failed to properly identify the course in its NCAA paperwork.

The result: Thompson has been declared ineligible to play college basketball at Southeast this year. He can't even practice with the team. And he can't accept the scholarship Southeast awarded him.

But that's not all. Another crack is that students at Henry County High who take the same questionable course that Thompson took will meet the NCAA's standards. All the right papers have been shuffled now. Too late for Thompson.

And another crack is that beginning next year student's caught in the previous cracks will still be considered partial qualifiers. This means they may practice with the team and get scholarships but not play in actual games. But not Thompson.

If Thompson, whom coaches describe as "a good kid," had graduated from high school just one year later, the cracks would have been closed.

Sports fans, players and coaches understand the need for closely monitored and strictly enforced rules, even though rule-making organizations can go overboard. Take some of the rules regarding how fans behave or how players celebrate after a goal or touchdown, for example. But sometimes there are cracks even the rules can't patch over. This is when a sense of fairness -- fair play, if you will -- ought to kick in. This is where human beings ought to make some choices that aren't covered by the rule book.