P.J. Tucker was never one to let schoolwork interfere with his dream of playing professional basketball.
During his first two years at the University of Texas at Austin, the star forward spent hours each week smoothing his jumpshot in the gym. But he slacked off in classes, often sitting in the back row, with headphones lodged in his ears. He rarely cracked a book until the night before a final examination.
That behavior caught up with Mr. Tucker. In the fall of 2004, he did not pass the required minimum of six credit hours, and the university ruled him academically ineligible for the spring 2005 season. During home games, he sat on the bench in street clothes. As he listened to opposing fans taunt him about his grades, he burned for a chance to redeem himself.
He received that chance in January 2005, when he met Randa Ryan, the new director of academic support for Texas’ athletics department. She developed a hands-on plan to help Mr. Tucker regain his eligibility and get on track to graduate. Her strategy: improving communication among tutors, professors, coaches, and athletes.
So far, the plan is working. Last semester Mr. Tucker received three A’s and one B. He returned to the court this season to lead the Longhorns, who are ranked among the country’s top 10 teams. And for the first time, he is preparing for a career after basketball.
Success stories like Mr. Tucker’s may hold timely lessons for college athletics officials. Under the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s new Academic Progress Rate requirements, colleges must act more vigilantly than ever to ensure that athletes not only pass their classes, but also make steady progress toward receiving their degrees.
Failure to meet those requirements brings stiff penalties: Last week the association stripped scholarships from 65 colleges whose athletes had earned unsatisfactory grades.
Many athletics departments are devoting increasing sums of money to academic-support programs. But as Texas officials have learned, the style and skills of those who work closely with athletes may influence players more than anything else.
No More Hiding
When Mr. Tucker lost his eligibility, in January 2005, Texas athletics officials learned that Sam LeCure, the ace pitcher for the university’s nationally ranked baseball team, and Selvin Young, a starting running back for the powerhouse football program, would also have to sit out the spring semester because they had earned poor grades.
The loss of three high-profile athletes led Texas to shake up its academic-services department. The university promoted Ms. Ryan, who oversaw the academic-support program for women’s sports, to supervise all Texas teams except football. The football team is so large, it now has its own academic advisers.
One of Ms. Ryan’s first moves was to meet with Rick Barnes, the men’s basketball coach, to develop a plan to get Mr. Tucker, a prolific scorer, back into his No. 2 jersey as soon as possible.
Ms. Ryan learned that Mr. Tucker was not the only basketball player with academic problems. Last year the Texas men’s basketball team had one of the five lowest Aca-demic Progress Rates of all the Division I basketball teams in the nation.
She knew she needed to reach out to the entire team — not just one star player. She also needed Mr. Barnes’s support for the players to take her seriously.
Mr. Barnes was all ears: He understood that if the team did not improve its Academic Progress Rate, the NCAA would start taking away scholarships. “The way we were doing things finally caught up to us,” Mr. Barnes says. “We realized getting by wasn’t good enough.”
The coach encouraged Ms. Ryan to make any changes she deemed necessary. “You’re the head coach of academics,” he told her. “And I’m your assistant.”
Ms. Ryan urged him to take time every day to ask his players how they were doing in their classes. She also persuaded him to move basketball practice from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. That way, the players could attend study hall in the afternoon, when they were alert enough to concentrate, instead of in the evening, after they had spent two hours in the gym.
Rescheduling the study sessions helped Mr. Tucker improve his study habits. “Before, 30 minutes into study hall,” he says, “I was exhausted and couldn’t think.”
Now, Mr. Tucker says, he reads ahead and reviews his notes during study hall, well before he has to face an exam. “It’s in my brain and I know it,” he says, “rather than trying to force it in the night before a test.”
Ms. Ryan and her colleagues are also reaching out to players, coaches, and faculty members more often than they have done in recent years, say several basketball players. Ms. Ryan has every basketball player’s cellphone number, meets regularly with their professors, and makes unannounced visits to classes to make sure athletes are showing up. She also talks daily with coaches and tutors, who meet every afternoon with athletes and know the players’ class schedules, assignments, and test dates.
The moves have changed the culture of the team, says Brad Buckman, a senior center.
“Before, everyone kind of drifted through the semester, and it was easy to hide things from your mentor, so you could relax,” he says. “Now you can’t have an off-day — someone’s always checking in on you.”
‘A Safety Net’
At first Mr. Tucker, who is now a junior, was skeptical about the changes. He worried that Ms. Ryan and other academic advisers would ride him about working harder, or take away some of his precious hours in the gym.
But Ms. Ryan put his fears to rest during their first meeting. She did not lecture him. Instead, she asked him what, besides basketball, did he love?
That, Mr. Tucker says, was a question nobody had ever asked him. Within minutes of meeting, the tattooed, 6-foot-5 athlete was opening up to the middle-aged mother of four. Mr. Tucker, a basketball prodigy since the seventh grade, told Ms. Ryan that he hoped to establish an after-school program for children of all backgrounds in his hometown of Raleigh, N.C. She later persuaded him to major in education and take summer-school classes to work ahead.
Mr. Tucker liked Ms. Ryan’s style and trusted her. “She’s like a safety net,” Mr. Tucker says. “She’s there to catch you if you start to fall.”
She also knows sports. Ms. Ryan, a former assistant swimming coach at Texas, has studied the mental-health needs of elite athletes. Her background helped her understand that Mr. Tucker needed someone to listen to him — and not scold him.
“When you have to live out your failures in the public eye, it can be particularly difficult,” Ms. Ryan says. “My job is to be a source of encouragement — not be punitive.”
Talking ‘Smack’
On a recent February afternoon, Ms. Ryan’s empathetic style was obvious as she moved from room to room in the university’s academic-support area for athletes. She poked her head into a room where Connor Atchley, a redshirt freshman basketball player, was practicing sign language with a tutor.
“How’s your math class going?” Ms. Ryan asked.
“It’s pretty tough,” he said. “One day it’s geometry, the next it’s algebra.”
Ms. Ryan nodded and turned to an assistant. “Put Connor down for some extra math tutoring one day a week,” she said.
Next she walked into a computer room, where Mr. Tucker and two teammates were checking their e-mail messages.
“P.J., how’d your kinesiology test go yesterday?” Ms. Ryan said.
“I got an A,” he said.
“P.J.!” she exclaimed, squeezing his shoulder. “I like it, I like it!”
So does Mr. Tucker. When he got two A’s in his classes last spring, he started bragging about his test scores in the locker room.
“It was the only thing he could talk smack about,” says his teammate, Mr. Buckman. “He wasn’t playing basketball, so he started focusing his competitive fire in the classroom.”
His success inspired his teammates to study harder, too, Mr. Barnes says.
“In all my years of coaching, I’ve never seen players have so much pride in their schoolwork,” Mr. Barnes says. “People are now conscious about wanting to graduate.”
On the whole, the team is performing better academically. Last semester the squad’s cumulative grade-point average was over a 3.0 — a whole point better than it had been the previous fall. As a result, the team will not lose any scholarships next fall.
Not all teams at Texas have seen such a turnaround. The Longhorns’ baseball program, for instance, will lose 10 percent of its scholarships next season because it failed to keep players on track toward graduating last year. The football team, however, is in no danger of losing scholarships.
Although Mr. Tucker is hitting the books harder than ever, he still dreams of playing in the National Basketball Association. On the way to practice every day, he walks by a wall in the basketball arena where many of the NBA jerseys of former Texas players hang. Of the hundreds of Longhorns hoops players over the last 60 years, only 17 have made it to the next level.
That statistic has sobered Mr. Tucker, who now covets something he did not care about a year ago: a T-Ring, a gold band given to Texas athletes when they receive their degrees.
“One day,” he says, “I’ll be wearing one of those.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Athletics Volume 52, Issue 27, Page A36
