Not so fast, said the NCAA.
“Over the last 24 hours, the University of Connecticut, the American Athletic Conference and the NCAA have been working together to determine whether a violation occurred when head women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma spoke with Mo’ne Davis over the phone during the 2014 Little League World Series,” UConn athletic director Warde Manuel said in a statement. “The NCAA has determined a secondary rules violation of bylaw 13.1.3.1 did occur and while UConn accepts this decision, we do not agree with it.
Manuel’s core argument continues to be that Davis is not a recruitable prospect. The trouble with that logic is that the NCAA’s rule on when you can call someone is not limited to prospective student-athletes (emphasis added):
Telephone calls to an individual (or his or her relatives or legal guardians) may not be made before Sept. 1 at the beginning of his or her junior year in high school.
If the limit were on calls to a prospective student-athlete, that rule would make no sense. The start date of Sept. 1 of the junior year for phone calls is designed to prevent too much early recruiting. Applying the rule only to prospects as defined by the NCAA would make it perfectly OK to make unlimited recruiting phone calls to middle schoolers, so long as you stopped the day they started ninth grade.
I still think UConn is correct, though, and Manuel mentions the better argument later in his statement (emphasis added):
“The nature of Coach Auriemma’s two-minute conversation with Mo’ne had nothing to do with recruiting and instead had everything to do with congratulating and encouraging Mo’ne to continued success."
The telephone bylaw I cited above is Bylaw 13.1.3.1. Let’s back out to Bylaw 13.1, the start of the NCAA recruiting bylaws on contacts and evaluations:
That can be parsed different ways but one reasonable way to read Bylaw 13.1 is that the telephone limits cover recruiting calls only. The NCAA already has a definition of recruiting we can use to judge whether this was a recruiting call or not:
So was Auriemma’s call to Davis an act of recruiting? Only in the Glengarry Glen Ross sense that college coaches should ABC: always be ‘crootin. It may be to Auriemma’s advantage in recruiting to call a promising if very young athlete and congratulate her versus not calling. But there is nothing to suggest that Auriemma engaged in any traditional recruiting tactic.
Is this type of rule workable? Possibly, so long as the NCAA requires contemporaneous documentation or prior approval of these types of calls, which Auriemma received. That might not be enough and college coaches may push the envelope too far, calling middle schoolers and young high schoolers to congratulate them on everything from athletic accomplishments to getting a 100 on a homework assignment, just to make the call. But a more nuanced rule is better than one which says that, generally speaking, coaches cannot call anyone until their junior year of high school.
