The National Association for Coaching Equity and Development, a new group of minority coaches, released a statement Friday condemning the NCAA's new eligibility standards and suggesting that disadvantaged and impoverished youth will bear the brunt of the changes.
"Our concern stems not from the NCAA's desire to recruit an athlete that is better prepared to meet the academic requirements of college; but rather from the rigidity of certain standards which will have the practical effect of denying a college education to a class of student athletes who are currently matriculating successfully and graduating from member colleges and universities," NAFCED said in the statement, which was sent to ESPN.com and The Associated Press.
Beginning with the 2016 class, athletes must have 10 of their 16 core credit courses fulfilled in their first three years of high school while maintaining a 2.3 GPA (2.0 GPA was the previous standard) in those courses to be eligible to compete as freshmen in the 2016-17 season.
A rebirth of the now-defunct Black Coaches Association with a more diverse pallet of objectives, NAFCED is led by Georgetown's John Thompson III, Texas Tech's Tubby Smith and former George Mason and Georgia Tech coach Paul Hewitt. The group met for the first time over Memorial Day weekend in Atlanta to discuss its goals.
Its initial focus has been the impact that the NCAA's new initial eligibility standard will have on potential college athletes.
The group has asked the NCAA to amend the requirements and give students in the 2016 class more time to fulfill them -- even if that means retaking a course in their senior years or counting postgraduate courses.
"Failure to augment or amend certain provisions of the 2016 Initial Eligibility Standards will only serve to deny equitable access and opportunities, to higher education, for less affluent students, which by all measures would be an unintended consequence beyond acceptability," NAFCED said in its statement.
NAFCED executive director Merritt Norvell and general counsel Ricky Lefft told the coaches in Atlanta that the new eligibility rules will affect many programs pursuing athletes who can't meet the standard. In 2012, the year the rules were approved, the NCAA said that 43.1 percent of the men's basketball players who enrolled in the 2009-10 school year would not have been eligible to play by the 2016 standards.
In 2013, the NCAA announced that it would maintain its current, less stringent GPA-test score sliding scale, a move that NCAA officials say would have significantly reduced the number of ineligible freshman athletes in the 2010-11 class if they had been assessed by the 2016 eligibility standards.