Academic woes result in penalties

Portland State sports teams felt the strong arm of the law earlier this week when the NCAA released its Academic Progress Reports Tuesday for the four-year period of academic years from 2003-04 through 2006-07.

Portland State men’s basketball, football, wrestling and indoor track and field programs were all reprimanded for failing to meet the NCAA’s standard Academic Progress Rate (APR) of 925. The APR is measuring tool that rates each Division I athletic team’s academic success.

“We had a pretty good sense of where we were,” said first-year athletic director Torre Chisholm. “But, I am a little disappointed with where we are.”

The rates, which all NCAA affiliates were given, are the result of athletes receiving one point for remaining eligible and one point for staying in school from one term to the next. To get the overall team score, those numbers are then added up and divided by the total number of points possible in a given period of time. A perfect score for a team is 1,000.

The Vikings football team, which had an APR of 920, took the biggest hit of the four academically underachieving Portland State programs, losing 2.78 scholarships.

Head coach Jerry Glanville, who did not take control of the football team until the 2007-08 academic year, was unaware the football team had any academic issues lingering from the Tim Walsh era, and said he has never been approached about any of his players struggling in class.

“I don’t know anything about that,” Glanville said. “I thought someone would have brought that to my attention.”

Glanville spoke freely about qualms he has with the NCAA and how they enforce the rules by taking away scholarships.

“Scholarships are what’s important,” Glanville said. “You have got to have scholarships or you don’t get better.”

The men’s indoor track team, with an APR of 900, and the wrestling team, with an APR of 858, were both penalized with a reduction in the total number of scholarships available for athletes. But according to Chisholm, neither one of those programs is fully funded by the university, so the loss of available scholarships will not be a factor. This is because the scholarships are not being funded or used by the university anyway.

With an APR of 894, the Big Sky Champion men’s basketball team was given a public notice by the NCAA, meaning if the team does not show improvement over the next three years they will begin to lose scholarships and possibly have to limit the amount of time players can be on the practice floor.

Still relatively new to Portland State, Glanville and Chisholm may not be responsible for the sub-par academic performances of the past, but they have already begun work to improve the standing of Viking athletes.

“This year we started a specialized student-athlete tutorial program, and we are in the process of hiring a second full-time academic support staff person,” Chisholm said. “New President [Wim] Wiewel has already started a task force to improve graduation rates, studying how we identify student-athletes, how we support them while they are here and how to emphasize graduating.”

Glanville takes a more direct approach to academic issues.

“We do a deal here where if you don’t do your six hours of study hall, you don’t hit this practice field,” Glanville said. “Is that new? I don’t know.”