Academic issues concern Southern

By JOSEPH SCHIEFELBEIN, Advocate sportswriter


The Southern football team has had at least 10 players become academically ineligible since the spring, but football hasn’t been the school’s only program touched by grade, retention and clearance issues.

In the previous school year, men’s basketball lost veteran forward Ralph Hishaw. Women’s basketball lost up-and-coming shooting guard Deidra Jackson. And baseball lost several veterans and couldn’t get Joshua Kirk, who earned his master’s degree in December, eligible until after the conference season concluded.

In May, the NCAA issued its Academic Progress Report and sent official warning letters to schools, including Southern.

SU was the nation’s only school whose three main men’s programs — football, basketball and baseball — were noted for all having academic concerns.

“With that APR, eventually we’re going to get penalized if we don’t turn this thing around,” SU Athletic Director Greg LaFleur said.

Plus, campus-wide, the problem of academic progress is getting more focus.

Southern reported its retention rate of freshman as 73.2 percent, but its six-year graduation rate was 27.7 percent. The school has been hurt financially by declining enrollment.

“I’m challenging the entire university. We’re going to do something with our retention rates,” SU Interim Chancellor Margaret Ambrose told the school’s student-athletes Thursday at an orientation meeting in the F.G. Clark Activity Center.

Ambrose spoke to the student-athletes about the APR warning letter from the NCAA.

“We have a challenge with at least three of our major sports,” Ambrose said. “I got an important letter that told me you guys are not where you’re supposed to be in terms of graduation rates. p We want not to fail you. Hold us to that. Study; go to class; if you need help, ask for it.”

LaFleur said the school will establish an academic center for student-athletes (in addition to other tools available on campus) in the Clark Center. He said the center, which will be open until 9 p.m., should be up and running in a month.

“We’re consciously doing some things to elevate the academic support we’re giving to the entire athletic department,” Ambrose said.

The problem could require research.
“We need to analyze and try to approach it from a data collection and analytic point of view,” Ambrose said. “We just have to bring to bear everything we can to figure this thing out.”

Photo: SU Football Coach Pete Richardson

The latest rash of ineligible football players, along with at least five more players who are no longer with the program, underscores the problem.

“I feel comfortable Ambrose and (SU System President Ralph) Slaughter understand we have an issue,” SU football coach Pete Richardson said.

“They’ve made a commitment to get us some help. Now, it’s not going to happen overnight, because the problem we have didn’t start overnight. It’s going to be a period of time of putting things in place.”

Like most Southwestern Athletic Conference schools, Southern recruits many nonqualifiers — players who are not eligible to practice or play as true freshmen — as well as players who are high risk even if they qualify initially.

“The mission of a lot of historically black colleges is to give a lot of the lesser an opportunity to go to school,” Richardson said.

“We’re going to get a higher-risk individual, especially from the inner-city schools.

“But then the standards are important, but you also have to realize some of them are all behind. I can just see this start to escalate unless you get some things in place to try to help them out.”

LaFleur said in May that SU had to make an effort to “minimize the risks in terms of whom we offer a scholarship to.”

In the past two recruiting classes, Richardson and his staff have signed a lower percentage of nonqualifiers than in previous classes.

Richardson said the NCAA’s recent change in determining eligibility based on a student-athletes percentage, by year, of completed coursework in a major has made an impact.

“The main reason is we went to the 40-60-80 rule,” Richardson said.

“With that, you have to declare a major and every year you have to maintain a certain percentage of that major in order to be eligible.

“I could see it two or three years ago, when they were putting it in, because of the student-athlete, historically, we’ve been recruiting. Some of our student-athletes are struggling with math and biology. Once you get behind, it’s almost impossible to maintain. That’s what hurting some of them at this time.”