Reform Born Of Infractions Ex-WSU Eligibility Coordinator Shares Blame With Old System

It wasn’t as if Barbara Bonace were blind-sided by the wave of eligibility certification problems that ultimately washed her out as Washington State’s compliance and eligibility director.

She saw the beginning of the swell the first day she stepped into the job five years ago.

But unlike some others who noticed the same problems and jumped ship, Bonace stayed on board and braced for the worst while trying to institute necessary changes.

It was a noble decision, but it cost her her job and left her looking like the villain after the school’s most recent of two run-ins with the NCAA’s enforcement committee.

Bonace was removed from her position within the athletic department last June after the Pacific-10 Conference found the school guilty of several NCAA infractions, including the use of ineligible players in football and baseball.

Her ouster was billed as a reassignment that was part of first-year athletic director Rick Dickson’s overhaul of the department.

“But, in essence, I was fired,” said Bonace, now director of WSU’s gay, lesbian and bi-sexual program. “I wish I’d have had the foresight some of my colleagues had - to just walk away from it knowing it had to be fixed. It was just bigger than me. I couldn’t do anything about it.”

In Bonace’s opinion, there weren’t enough resources to adequately deal with the continuing certification of nearly 450 student-athletes. Whenever a tough call had to be made, it was made amid the biases of those in the athletic department.

“It was very clear to me after my compliance review with the NCAA the first month that I got here that we were too centralized within the athletic department,” Bonace explained. “So I started from that point to reach out for help.”

She got the admissions and financial aid offices to share some of the certification responsibilities and tried to get the registrar’s office involved.

But at the time, according to Bonace, the university was in the process of hiring a new registrar and seemed reluctant to change.

Eventually, the hire was made. As part of a re-organization of the certification process, the registrar’s office became one of the first eligibility checkpoints.

Assistant Registrar Michael Brooks, hired six months ago, wasn’t around when the latest infractions occurred. But he understands the old system’s shortcomings.

“It looks like it was probably looser than it should have been,” he said. “I’m not one of the those who is so cynical as to say the fox was guarding the henhouse, but on the other hand, it was a system where everything just kind of rested on the shoulders of one person, who was in the athletic department. It was pretty much her call, and beyond that, it was just a matter of if anyone chose to listen to her or not.”

Under the new setup, the first determination of a student-athlete’s eligibility status is made by the registrar’s office.

An athletic eligibility coordinator from within the registrar’s office compiles a daily list that includes the eligibility status of in-season student-athletes and forwards it to the athletic department, where copies go to personnel ranging from Dickson to equipment manager Wendell Neal.

The list is then reviewed by faculty representative Irving Tallman, who answers directly to the president’s office and has the last word on a student-athlete’s eligibility.

“Unfortunately, it didn’t happen soon enough,” Bonace said of the changes, which took place after a series of her own oversights brought on the latest Pac-10 and NCAA sanctions.

The most serious violation, announced by the NCAA earlier this week, included use of an ineligible football player for eight games during the 1992 season.

It was determined that the student-athlete, a part-time special teams player, participated despite having earned only 23 semester units of credit - one short of the NCAA’s satisfactory progress rule - during the previous school year.

The violation was made more serious when it was learned that Bonace knew about the infraction, but failed to promptly report it.

Bonace accepts full blame for the oversight, defending her decision not to report it as a case of compassion-induced poor judgment.

According to Bonace, the player involved had repeated a 1-hour weight-training course - a fact she did not notice when she checked his transcripts following the spring of 1992. As a result, she thought the student needed only three summerschool credits to stay eligible.

Bonace advised him to enroll in a 3-hour psychology course. Once he passed it, she thought he would be eligible that next fall.

Prior to the start of the school year, however, Bonace learned he was still a credit short because of the duplicated weight-training class.

“Basically, the kid did everything he was told to do,” Bonace explained. “If he was advised at all about repeating the one-unit (weighttraining) course, he was wrongly advised. And he was never told about needing an additional credit during summer school.

“So I decided on my own - without any indication from or any conversation with anyone else, to stay with my original evaluation of his eligibility. I just ignored the fact that there was a repeated class on his transcript.”

That allowed the player to compete that fall, rather than lose an entire year of eligibility because of Bonace’s oversight. The incident might never have surfaced had former men’s track coach John Chaplin not learned about the problem and informed the school’s legal counsel.

If she had it to do over again, Bonace said she would advise the student-athlete to go back and negotiate with his weight-training instructor for credit for the repeated class.

Today, however, not even the negotiating would be necessary, because the class has since been changed to an independent study course that allows credits for each semester it is taken.

Bonace was even able to have the additional credit hour for repeating the course added to the student-athlete’s transcript retroactively.

Incidents involving the use of another ineligible football player during the 1991 season and an ineligible baseball player last spring were also results of Bonace’s oversights.

She insists they would probably not have happened if the current system had been in place. “If there’s a silver lining to all of this, it’s that everything is in place now, just as it should have been all along,” Bonace explained.