During the weeks before the move, clusters of cubicles arose around the floor of the warehouse, and a few dozen employees began settling in behind new desks. Then, the center’s staff began assembling something else – a new approach to certifying the academic and amateur eligibility of about 70,000 young men and women who want to play a sport next year in Division I or II.
Because of the new center’s status as a limited liability company, some of the center’s staff members talk in terms of starting a new business – as does an Association administrator who will be monitoring the new venture’s performance as it assumes a vital job on behalf of the NCAA membership.
“As with any kind of start-up company – and that’s kind of how we refer to it – we’re really putting the focus on doing first things first, and that’s what we’ve encouraged them to do,” says Kevin Lennon, the Association’s vice president for membership services. “The two main things are to certify the academic and the amateur status of student-athletes, and we have to be successful in those areas.”
The Eligibility Center, however, offers an opportunity to do those things in a new way – to take that basic task, the certification of student-athletes, and make it the foundation for welcoming young people into intercollegiate athletics while providing the NCAA membership with something more than a paper-pushing service.
Six months after the center turned on its phones and began handling initial-eligibility certification last November 1, all the moving pieces of the certification process – learning about high schools, cataloguing core courses, registering students, checking transcripts, analyzing amateur standing and dealing with whatever problems arise – are beginning to mesh in that converted warehouse space.
Now, the center’s first real test – completing the certification of its inaugural class of student-athletes before practices and classes begin late this summer – is approaching, and as the time to put plans into action nears, the staff is doing something else new.
Greg Dana, the center’s director of client relations, calls it “pulling back the curtain to reveal the wizard.” He means that the center is offering its most important stakeholders – the NCAA membership – full disclosure, a peek at the pulleys and levers, and a chance to become fully invested in the center’s success.
It’s a risky move. Most new ventures keep the engine under wraps while working out the bugs, but the Eligibility Center is moving in a decidedly new direction from the type of service the membership received from the old Initial-Eligibility Clearinghouse. Inviting the membership into the process seems worth the risk if doing so produces not just observers, but partners, in the effort.
“The real test is going to be this summer, and realistically, we’ll be graded on what happens this summer,” Dana says. This first summer, he says, is going to be a challenge.
“When you create something from the ground floor, you’re never really sure how that’s all going to work, and it’s a relatively high-pressure environment – because of volume, and because you’re dealing with student-athletes who really are just one-time customers,” says Eligibility Center President Todd Leyden. “You’re dealing with deadlines and people’s futures and careers, so it can be challenging.”
One thing, however, is certain as the summer approaches: Leyden, Dana and the Eligibility Center staff are eager to pull back that curtain.
“You work really hard – you train hard, and you practice and practice and practice, then practice again – and then the gates open and final transcripts come flowing through, the final amateurism questionnaires come flowing through, and it’s all systems go,” says Jennifer Fraser, associate director of client relations.
“I think everybody’s really ready for that.”
Leyden confirms that the Eligibility Center aspires to something more than just doing the same work that was performed by the Initial-Eligibility Clearinghouse, the service operated for the past 14 years by American College Testing Inc.
“I’ll paint the vision in two parts,” says Leyden, a former management consultant and business owner who last year began assembling a staff of about 65 employees at the center.
“One, and it’s pretty simple, is that we need our key customers outside the membership to understand who we are and how we can help them. And, in this age of technology, we have to provide tools and resources.”
A company has owners, it has investors, and it has customers – in this case, all those aspiring college athletes who want to play at NCAA member schools, and their parents. The tools and resources Leyden is talking about include things such as an informative Web site, an easy-to-follow registration process and tools to help students stay on the path toward meeting the Association’s academic and amateurism requirements.
“The second part is, there’s a much broader opportunity, along with the national office, to use this channel that now exists and is managed and directed by the NCAA, to reach young people for a lot of different things,” Leyden continues. “It can (include) messaging about what the NCAA wants to do – we want to let you know about performance-enhancing drugs or gambling or agents, or health and wellness, or what it means to be an athlete….
“I suspect we’ve really just scratched the surface of the opportunity – how do we reach out and engage young athletes?”
For now, however, engaging young athletes means cutting through all the other stuff kids see and hear – and early enough during their high school days – just to get them to register for certification.
They need to register to begin the process of certifying that they have met academic standards, including the 16 core courses they must complete in high school under a new NCAA requirement. They also must prove their amateur status through completion of a questionnaire.
There are 150,000 or more youngsters in each senior class who will register for certification at some point during their secondary school days – including the nearly 70,000 who ultimately will attract the interest of a Division I or II program and receive a final certification. Many more simply aspire to play a sport in college and choose to keep their names on file, just in case.
Some in this year’s class possibly don’t know even now, about a month before graduation, that they need to be certified.
But perhaps about 10 to 15 percent of the class already is good to go through a new early-certification option for students who are performing well enough academically that they seem certain to graduate from high school and meet eligibility standards. Passing them on through helps pare down the number of aspirants the center will have to spend time certifying this summer. Another 75 to 80 percent should receive certification this summer without encountering problems – it’s just a matter of how soon the center’s staff receives materials and finishes the work.
“When it’s all said and done, the large majority of student-athletes should move through the system pretty easily – probably about 90 percent,” Leyden says. “We’ll be focusing a lot of our resources on 5 to 10 percent.”
The NCAA’s member schools can help pare the number requiring special handling a bit more, and that’s why Dana says it’s important not only to show the membership how the center is doing its work – to pull back the curtain so the membership can see how many different pieces of information must fall into place before the center can certify a student-athlete’s eligibility – but also to coax the membership into active collaboration in the effort.
“When the (Initial-Eligibility) Clearinghouse started this process 14 years ago, it was a pretty black and white world,” Dana says. “It was, here’s your grade-point average, here’s your test score – does it fit the (eligibility) scale? And the world we live in now, with online education and ‘credit recovery’ (making up failed courses) and nontraditional course work, as well as the amateurism review – it’s all about gathering the correct information and all about putting the right value on the right piece of information that you have, in order to reach correct decisions.
“And if you just have a (certifying organization) sitting on an island – in Iowa or in Indianapolis – it needs help from the membership collecting and analyzing that information, or the results aren’t going to be as good.”
Dana’s client relations team is appropriately named. It handles phone calls from and to registered students, their parents, the high schools they attend and, increasingly, NCAA schools where they will compete in athletics.
“Client” means – in the parlance of this start-up business – not just customers (student-athletes and their families), not just sources of information (including more than 23,000 high schools that submit about 600 core courses daily for inclusion in the center’s database), but also an NCAA membership that has a huge interest in the center’s success.
The client relations staff is providing a customer-service and membership-outreach component for the Association’s initial-eligibility certification operations that didn’t exist at the Initial-Eligibility Clearinghouse.
Working with Divisions I and II conferences and their member schools is a big part of Fraser’s job at the center.
“By pulling the curtain away, what we’re basically saying is, look, we are all here to serve and to work with you,” says Fraser, a former compliance director at Metropolitan State. “If you’ve got a question, call us. If you’ve got a comment, call us. We’ll take your call and we’ll have a discussion. We want to engage with you.”
Fraser brings a useful perspective to her work, as someone who has come to understand how she might have benefited while working on a campus if she’d been able to pick up a phone and ask her own questions about the certification process.
“A main reason why I took this job was, while I didn’t ever have a horrible experience with the initial-eligibility process – nothing I’d really get frustrated about – it wasn’t great, either. So something that’s really important to me is to offer insight.
“I walked into this building and I learned things about the business. And I thought, holy cow, if I’d known that on campus, how much easier my life would have been. That’s really what this is about for me – I’m taking the information I’m learning here, because I’m still new, and trying to go to the membership with that perspective.”
That perspective has helped the center find ways to provide real service to the membership, and also to solve problems. For example, institutions recently expressed frustration about the difficulty of tracking the dozens of prospective student-athletes who are placed each year on Institutional Request Lists – lists indicating which prospects schools are recruiting and who will need a final certification. Prospects now also must be listed on an IRL before making an official visit to a campus or receiving a financial aid offer.
Because the center is the keeper of all those IRLs, the staff determined it could provide more information from those records, thus enabling schools not only to see who is listed, but when the listing occurred.
The center actively seeks to learn about the membership’s needs and concerns, not only through formal channels such as its conference outreach program, through which each league can contact an assigned staff member at the center for assistance, but through attendance at meetings and frequent communication via telephone and e-mail.
That type of collaboration between the staff and the membership works both ways, Dana says.
“If we can better define the things the membership can help us with and the things that we can help with, through our discussions with the membership and through our work in the customer service area – if we can build a better collaborative environment with the membership – we can make this process work better,” he says.
The center is getting some of its best early reviews for that effort.
“A number of A-10 institutions have worked directly with our contact with much success,” says Jackie Campbell, associate commissioner of the Atlantic-10 Conference and the current chair of the Division I Management Council.
“I have received a lot of positive feedback from my members with regard to their experiences in working with our conference contact to resolve issues,” she says. “The fact that we have an individual that we know we can contact for help is an improvement from previous interaction with the clearinghouse.”
Two phrases appear more often than any other in the figurative script that’s being written by staff members during the Eligibility Center’s debut: “collaboration” and “customer service.”
The center’s employees are working not only to build a cooperative approach with high schools, coaches associations, and – most of all – the NCAA membership; they also are seeking to serve those clients through quick and accurate responses to questions and concerns.
There are a variety of clients to serve, but the staff also recognizes that its future viability hinges most on how well it serves its primary customer: student-athletes.
“We need to put the student-athletes first,” Dana agrees. “We need to be student-athlete friendly.”
Doing so helps athletes achieve their dreams – and doing it well also helps the membership focus more on providing a rewarding experience for student-athletes once they arrive on campus.
“If we do things like build an easy-to-navigate process that leads kids to the right answer – if we show them their path to eligibility and pull them into the fold and encourage them along the way – that will be a huge service to the kids, and I hope it’ll be perceived as a huge service to the membership. If (schools are) getting better-prepared kids, I hope it will take some pressure off them, so they don’t have to do all the education (about the certification process) themselves and we can do most of it.”
The center is winning plaudits in that mission, too.
“Students are an incredibly important, if not the most important, customer, so we begin from that premise,” Lennon says. “The center is there to problem-solve, when problems arise – to help parents or the students themselves through their high schools.”
The way the new center is physically set up seems to help encourage that spirit of problem-solving. The academic certification and review, amateurism certification, high school review, and client relations staffs all work together on an open floor and are able to confer across organizational lines when an issue arises.
“We’ve got an environment where the experts in the high school review area or the core-course review area or the waiver area, or the learning-disability expert or the international expert, are willing to take the time to teach all of the others, so that we all get stronger and each can carry a little more weight this summer,” Dana says.
“I can’t compliment the folks who designed this enough; it was the right model for this environment,” Fraser says. “Because what it creates is collaboration without even trying. We are a staff that understands that getting to the best outcome – the correct outcome at the right time – is the most important thing. So, we all have accepted that we are open, and we all work together constantly.”
As summer approaches, Leyden thinks the staff is energized by the challenge, and excited by the “entrepreneurial” opportunity, to create something new.
“Frankly, there are lots of challenges in a start-up enterprise,” he says. “We’ve worked hard at trying to figure out what it is we’re trying to do and what we are trying to accomplish, as opposed to just cranking through work.”
As the curtain opens fully – as the entire production unfolds – the Eligibility Center’s staff hopes its efforts will play well with the audience. The promise is to do whatever it takes to keep the show going.
“We’re not going to fail,” Dana says. “It’s just a matter of how hard we have to work to not fail.”