St. John's University Athletics
St. John's Quotes On NCAA Ruling
5/11/2006 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
May 11, 2006
Rev. Donald J. Harrington, President, St. John's University
On the outcome of the NCAA's report:
"I had great confidence throughout this process, because we were doing it the right way, that the outcome would be a good, solid and fair outcome. And that's exactly how I feel. We received good guidance from the outside, great cooperation inside, and I'm very comfortable with the resolution of it. I feel as though the fact that we ourselves could assess what were the appropriate penalties and impose them, shows that we are really on top of the program and the situation."
On St. John's strengthened relationship with the NCAA:
"Having read [the NCAA's report], I was very pleased to read that the NCAA commended us for our cooperation and clearly understood what we're about as a university and talked about how helpful it was to come in and be there. That was all in the report, so I was pleased that clearly we're able to walk this path together. This is a great outcome, and there's now a much stronger relationship with the NCAA, which is the way I want to keep it."
On the University's monitoring process:
"Whenever anything like this happens, we have to recognize the fact that there are no excuses. This is the University's basketball program, and the University and I, as President, are responsible. One distinction I would make in saying that is that the NCAA never raised a question or charged us with institutional control problems. 'Institutional control' problems would mean that this program or the overall athletics program did not have the control it should. Monitoring means that a small piece of it went wrong, and realistically that can happen. That can happen in academic areas, it can happen in almost any part of a university or corporation. So it happened, the university or the corporation accepts responsibility for that, doesn't make excuses, and does all it can to ensure that it does not happen again."
Chris Monasch, Director of Athletics
On the findings of the National Collegiate Athletic Association investigation:
"A number of years ago, we reported the findings from our internal investigation. Today, we're excited about moving forward, and we're happy that there are no additional sanctions. We feel we have a stronger program in place, and certainly a point of emphasis for our staff and the university is that we're going to do things in the proper way. We have a greatly strengthened NCAA compliance program to move forward, and it's just great that Norm [Roberts] and his staff can now focus on continuing to improve the basketball team."
Norm Roberts, Head Men's Basketball Coach
On his concerns throughout the investigation:
"I thought the University handled it great, and I was not concerned at all. I think that we cooperated fully with everybody. Father Harrington and everyone involved kept me in the loop of what was going on, and I thought that, if we did everything we needed to, it would turn out alright for us."
On moving forward with university-imposed sanctions in place:
"I'm totally relieved. I think it's a great day for us, and we can move on with our program. What we tried to do in recruiting is we were up front and honest with everybody, letting them know what the situation was and how we were going to do things in the future. I'm just excited about it. It gives us another scholarship next year, and we can go back to 13 and move on with our business."
On the investigation's impact on recruiting:
"It was brought up a few times, but not many, and we would address it first-hand. We would let them know right way what our situation was, how we were cooperating fully and how we had hoped that it would come out to a resolution like this. When those questions were raised to us, the person would say, 'We didn't know if you were going to tell us right away.' But we were up front and honest and let them know right away what the situation was, so it wasn't that much of a problem, as far as people not having knowledge of what was going on."
Mike Glazier of Bond, Schoeneck & King, Outside Counsel To St. John's University
On the NCAA Committee's view of St. John's findings:
"We just used the same approach as we try to all the time, and that is when you have an institution that is as cooperative and wants to give the truth like St. John's, we go in with the facts, whether they're good or bad, we present those to the committee. Then, you also want to focus on what the institution has done to try to ensure that these things don't happen again in the future. I thought St. John's had a real good set of corrective measures to talk to the committee about, and I believe the committee was also impressed with those."
On the penalty St. John's would pay for future violations:
"If it's a secondary violation, I don't think it means anything. But the reality is, and everyone in college athletics knows it, that if today an institution is not discovering and reporting a secondary violation on occasion, that they don't have a good compliance monitoring program in place. So you have to anticipate that there will be some minor secondary violations discovered. The real concern here over the next few years is that there's a major violation, and that's when enhanced penalty and enhanced scrutiny would kick in. I don't anticipate that, with the compliance program that is in place now and the culture of the basketball program, there will be any violations in the future."
