Kane...
unc’s contrasting treatment of Williams, Hatchell draws attention
Men’s coach gets a contract extension; Sylvia Hatchell does not
Enrollments in fake classes much higher among football, men’s basketball
unc Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham disputes lack of support for women’s coach
unc-Chapel Hill has two Hall of Fame basketball coaches who each have at least one national championship on their resumes: Sylvia Hatchell and Roy Williams.
Hatchell is the second winningest women’s coach in NCAA history; Williams was the fastest men’s coach to 700 wins. Both have been coaching for more than 25 years and have nearly always taken their teams to the NCAA tournament.
But as the NCAA case involving serious allegations against both programs grinds toward likely sanctions, Williams, 65, has won a lucrative contract extension; Hatchell, 63, is without one.
unc officials aren’t explaining why two top-flight coaches would be treated differently. As a result, the university has attracted questions about whether it is sacrificing Hatchell and her program to spare the men’s basketball program from harsh NCAA sanctions. Neither coach has been accused of doing anything wrong.
Since the NCAA hit unc with allegations of five major infractions, including a lack of institutional control, Hatchell has seen her team take a heavy blow. Three recruits from a stellar 2013 recruiting season have left for other schools. One transferred days before the allegations arrived at unc; the other two in the following weeks. A fourth left a year ago, after a season in which Hatchell stepped away to undergo chemotherapy to combat leukemia. Hatchell so far has held onto this season’s recruiting class, which includes two high school All-Americans.
On Friday, unc Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham said more evidence emerged that a few more former women basketball players had received improper academic help. He said that information had been shared with the NCAA. This development is likely to push back a hearing on the NCAA’s allegations at least by two months.
On the men’s side, Williams continues to field an experienced team already touted as a favorite for the 2016 national championship. Only one player left – for the NBA, and not out of fear of a tournament ban. Top high school prospects, however, have shown concern about possible sanctions and have chosen other schools, including archrival Duke...
Cunningham’s announcement makes it more likely that the men’s team will finish the upcoming season before the NCAA decides penalties.
Football recruits have said coach Larry Fedora told them the NCAA won’t hurt his program, based on the advice of unc’s lawyers. Fedora has not discussed specifics, but said he felt “confident things were going to turn out good.”
Last month, Meghan Austin, a former player of Hatchell’s and now a coach herself, drew national attention to the differing perceptions of the men’s and women’s programs in a column published in The News & Observer. She claimed that unc is sacrificing Hatchell and her program to the NCAA to spare men’s basketball and football.
“With the NCAA allegations, I am trying to wrap my head around how the women’s basketball team has been made the scapegoat in all of this,” wrote Austin, the women’s basketball coach at Montreat College near Asheville. “Our program was not the only team in the report, yet we are the ones being talked about the most. Roy Williams and his program were in the report, and he got a contract extension. The football program was in the report, and its coaching staff was confident enough to tell recruits that they will not receive any repercussions from the NCAA investigation.”
Among those who tweeted the link to Austin’s column: Chamique Holdsclaw, a former University of Tennessee and WNBA star; and Nicole LaVoi, a University of Minnesota professor and advocate for women’s sports.
“The war on Women Coaches is real,” LaVoi tweeted. She later said in an email she knew little about the case.
In an interview last month, Cunningham declined to discuss the details of Hatchell’s contract situation. He typically does not comment on personnel matters. Her contract ends in 2018; Williams’ extension keeps him at unc until 2020.
“I have immense respect for Coach Hatchell and her career and the success that she’s had,” Cunningham said. “I’m delighted that she’s contracted through 2018. And as we do with all of our teams, I’ll review her situation, her team’s situation, at the end of (next) season.”
On Friday, he said he continued to have confidence in the program’s coaching staff.
Bringing the money
Men’s basketball and football are the money-making sports at unc and other top Division I schools. Men’s basketball feeds the coffers of the NCAA. The organization collected nearly a billion dollars in revenue last year, USA Today reported, nearly all of it from the “March Madness” tournament. The majority of the money goes back to the member schools.
Women’s sports typically lose money, but universities are required under the federal anti-discrimination Title IX law to carry them if they want to have men’s programs.
unc’s football and men’s basketball teams were the two highest in terms of enrollments in the fake classes within the African studies department, according to the most in-depth investigation into the scandal, which was led by former federal prosecutor Kenneth Wainstein. Over an 18-year period, more than 3,100 students enrolled in the fake classes; roughly half of them were athletes.
There were two types of bogus classes: lecture classes that never met, and independent studies that had no instruction. Football players accounted for 963 enrollments in the classes that were listed as lectures, which began in 1999, while men’s basketball accounted for 226. Football teams include roughly seven times as many athletes as basketball.
Men’s basketball had nearly double the 114 enrollments of the women’s basketball team.
The disparity is even greater in the independent studies, which began in 1993. Men’s basketball players were in these classes from the beginning, while the women don’t show up in significant numbers until 1998. By 1999, when the fake lecture classes were added to the scam, the men’s team had 57 independent studies enrollments, compared with 15 enrollments for the women. (Wainstein said at least half of all the independent studies offered had no instruction...)
