Court revives Disabilities Act lawsuit against NCAA

PHILADELPHIA -- A snapshot shows Michael Bowers towering over his petite mother in his prom tuxedo, the star athlete's future seemingly full of promise.

The 6-foot-7 Bowers had been actively recruited for his football prowess, and dreamed of playing for a Division I team.

But once coaches saw his transcript from Palmyra High School in New Jersey -- where he battled a learning disability, but still ranked 52nd out of 90 in the class of 1996 -- the phone stopped ringing. He was not likely to meet NCAA freshman eligibility rules because of his special-education classes.

"[One coach] was devastated when he looked at Michael's transcript because he knew he would never be cleared," said his mother, Kathleen Bowers.

Last month, a federal appeals court revived Bowers' 1997 lawsuit against the NCAA, saying Bowers might have been discriminated against under the Americans with Disabilities Act. But the long-sought victory is bittersweet for Kathleen Bowers.

Michael, her only child, died of a drug overdose in June 2002.

"He was so young. Twenty-four. He had his whole life ahead of him," Kathleen Bowers said recently from her tidy home in Palmyra, just across the river from Philadelphia.

She plans to pursue the suit, which her son initiated as a teenager, even though the NCAA nine years ago changed its procedures to better accommodate the learning disabled. She hopes winning damages would make the NCAA even more careful in its treatment of special-education students.

The defendants include Temple University and the University of Iowa, which argue that they stopped recruiting Michael Bowers over his football, not his academic abilities.

Bowers' lawyer said the NCAA rules, though changed over the years, still make it hard for learning-disabled students to prove themselves college material. If they acknowledge taking special-education classes, they have to show they are equivalent to regular classes, she said.

"Why are you going to self-identify when you know that that identification may result in your being excluded or being forced to jump through certain other hoops that other people don't have to undergo?" asked attorney Barbara Ransom of the Public Interest Law Center in Philadelphia.

NCAA rules require student-athletes to complete a certain number of core high school classes, and obtain minimum grades and SAT scores, to compete freshman year at a Division I or Division II school.

The standards were created in 1983 to keep schools from recruiting star athletes who could not do college work. But critics soon charged that the NCAA lacked the expertise to evaluate coursework at schools across the country.

The Justice Department investigated and negotiated a 1998 consent decree that gave learning-disabled students more power to appeal or seek waivers. The NCAA also pledged to look at the content covered in a course, and not just its "remedial" or "special-education" label.

"Since the consent decree was entered, there have been no new lawsuits brought against the NCAA alleging that an initial eligibility decision failed to accommodate a learning disability," NCAA spokesman Erik Christianson said in an e-mail.

The NCAA approved all but 10 of 116 requests for disability waivers in the 2005-2006 academic year, he said.

But until 1998, waivers only could be sought by the recruiting college. So Bowers had little recourse when the NCAA certified just three of his high school classes, even though he would complete his Individualized Education Plan and earn a diploma.

"He had every reason to believe he had wonderful opportunities available to him at a university to pursue both his educational and his athletic interests," said Ransom. "To have those hopes dashed so dramatically, it was devastating."

She remembers Bowers as a polite teenager who first came to her law firm in a suit and tie.

"When he testified at the preliminary injunction hearing, he was so impressive that the defendants, to a person, came up to him and shook his hand," Ransom said. But the injunction was denied, and Bowers fell into a tailspin, she said.

Chad Ganden, a former state champion swimmer from Illinois, also sued the NCAA in the late 1990s over its rejection of his special-education classes.

Ganden was deemed a partial qualifier, which allowed him to practice but not compete his freshman year at Michigan State.

"That's hard to recover from. I gained weight. I had a loss of endurance," said Ganden, who settled the suit and is now a high school coach in Aurora, Ill.

Although Bowers had trouble processing information, he had an above-average IQ and earned a 3.6 GPA as a commuter student at Temple in the spring of 1997, court documents show.

But he was struggling by that fall, having become addicted to painkillers following back surgery, according to his mother. At some point, he graduated to the cocaine and heroin that killed him.

Kathleen Bowers said she helped her son go through several drug-treatment programs. She thought he had the problem licked in 2002, when he completed the spring semester at American International University in Springfield, Mass., and participated in spring football drills. He hoped to make the team that fall.

"I had no idea. I thought everything was OK," his mother said.

Ransom believes things might have turned out differently if her client had won the preliminary injunction.

"I thought he felt hopeless," Ransom said. "He thought, 'I've done everything that everybody's asked me to. And I'm stuck out here with nothing."'