NCAA criticizes lack of control

Southeast Missouri State athletic director Don Kaverman admitted Wednesday that he was stung by the NCAA Committee on Infractions' finding that the university lacked institutional control over its women's basketball program.

The committee on Wednesday released the infractions report and detailed penalties against the program. Southeast will be on probation for two years and its women's basketball program had to give up two years of victories, including the 2005-06 Ohio Valley Conference championship season.

The report took the university to task for its lack of oversight during B.J. Smith's four-year tenure.

"The committee finds that the institution lacked institutional control of its athletics program related to these violations and that the former head coach failed to monitor his program," the report said.

It stated the university failed to heed warning signs raised by an internal investigation in the fall of 2003 and an internal memo in the summer of 2004.

"The institution neither adopted procedures reasonably calculated to assure rules compliance nor monitored the presence of prospects on campus," the report stated.

It added that failure to audit travel records for the men's basketball program in 2004-05 and 2005-06 were part of the reason three student-athletes sitting out after transferring traveled with the team when they were not eligible to do so.

"I'm disappointed in it," Kaverman said of the institutional control term, "because it's a reflection of the program. Institutional control is an allegation that people always think the worst. They read that and think your program is out of control, and that couldn't be further from the truth.

"It was applied in this case in reference to a very specific issue having to do with prospects moving into our community prior to their first semester of enrollment at the institution and the procedures that we did not have in place to effectively monitor their activity. And we acknowledged that we didn't have those procedures in place. We weren't aware we need to have those procedures in place, but we do now."

Asked Thursday about whether he expected some fallout for the NCAA's criticism of department oversight, Kaverman said, "I think that's natural human tendency."

He said he takes "full responsibility" for the lack of having procedures in place.

In five paragraphs of the report on the finding of a lack of institutional control, the committee stated "established policies might have avoided some of the violations" in the summer activities for women's basketball, the secondary recruiting violations for the program from 2003 to 2005 and the travel violations for the men's program.

"The scope and nature of the violations" detailed in those three areas "demonstrate that the institution lacked institutional control over the conduct, rules compliance and administration of its athletics program," the report said.

While the investigation process covered 29 months, Kaverman said it's been a long five years since the beginning of the first investigation into the women's program.

"I can't begin to describe the amount of time we as an institution have spent on this and I have spent on this as an individual over the last five years," Kaverman said. "It's completely preoccupied us, and it's not a process I ever want to go through again before I retire as an athletic director.

"There are always issues, and that is a real difficulty for an institution of our size, with our resources and our staff, to appropriately vet those issues and determine where the facts are and what's fact and what's fiction. We're not professional investigators.

"It's extremely time-consuming; and we did absolutely the best job we could do."

The report closed with a summary of corrective actions taken by the university, which includes new wording on coaches' contracts, a restructuring of duties for the assistant AD for compliance, the development of a coaches compliance manual that includes authorization procedures for summer activities, development of a recruiting log and a policy to increase scrutiny of travel rosters.

"We've developed specific policies to speak to the specific issues in this report," Kaverman said, "most notably monitoring the activities of prospects that may move into our community prior to their first semester of full-time enrollment.

"I feel very good about where we are, going forward, in reference to our compliance program."