Southeast's NCAA compliance director steps down

~ Alicia Scott cited family reasons for resigning her position.

Even though Southeast Missouri State's compliance director has stepped down, athletic director Don Kaverman said that should not affect the NCAA's ongoing investigation of the university's women's basketball program.

Alicia Scott recently resigned after more than 20 years at Southeast, including the past 10 as assistant athletic director for compliance and student services.

"I don't think it should cause a problem for us at all," Kaverman said. "We're working with a consultant and through the Ohio Valley Conference office on this matter.

"From our end, we're just waiting to hear back from the NCAA. I don't really know what their timetable is. My guess is by the end of July for sure."

Said Scott: "The majority of the investigation is over from our end. I actually stayed longer than I had planned. Now it's just a matter of waiting to hear back from the NCAA."

Scott said her resignation was brought on by wanting to spend more time with her family and simply not enjoying her job as much as she felt she should.

Scott and her husband Mike, who recently began an insurance career after being a longtime teacher and administrator in area school systems, have two children, 14-year-old daughter Susan Beth and 11-year-old son Ramsey.

"I just decided to stay home with the kids, who are both very involved in sports and other activities," Scott said. "They're at kind of a critical stage, with a lot of things going on."

As for the personal frustration with her position, Scott said she had simply been forced to move away from the reason she got into college athletics in the first place.

Scott, a Kentucky native and a former standout basketball player at Western Kentucky, spent her first 10 years at Southeast as an assistant women's basketball coach under Ed Arnzen.

Once her second child was born, Scott said she wanted to spend more time with her family and less time on the road traveling to games and recruiting, so Southeast offered her a position as athletic academic coordinator.

After one year in that role, she became an assistant athletic director and the university's first employee in charge of compliance full-time.

"The reason I got into athletics, I really enjoyed working with student-athletes. I was able to do that when I was coaching," she said. "What happened with this job, I really don't deal with the students and that was frustrating. They pretty much try to avoid you, because if I talked to them, it was usually for something bad, like they were ineligible.

"The first few years in this job it was exciting, building something new, developing the program. But the last few years it was just frustrating. When we went Division I, there were just so many more rules and regulations."

Said Kaverman, "I don't think compliance was something that was ever really her first love. Quite frankly, the job has changed a lot over the last several years. It has become so detailed. If you're an individual who is not suited to that, sitting in front of the computer so much, it can be quite tedious.

"We had determined that we were going to make this position solely a compliance one, and I don't think she was really interested in that."

That would have taken away the part of Scott's position -- monitoring and overseeing Southeast's student academic services -- that she still was quite fond of.

"That I really enjoyed. I got to interact a lot with the student-athletes," Scott said. "But I didn't really enjoy the compliance role. It didn't really fit my personality."

Added Scott, "Southeast has been a major part of my life. I made a lot of friends and have a lot of fond memories. I'll miss it."

Kaverman said Southeast hopes to find a replacement for Scott "as soon as possible."