BY HANNAH PURKEY

In print | September 11, 2008

There have been plenty of embarrassing moments in the sports world. Take, for instance, Diana Ross missing her ceremonious penalty kick as part of the disastrously gaudy 1994 World Cup opening ceremonies. Or take Steve Smith scoring the winning goal in game seven of the 1986 conference finals … for the other team. Oh, and who can forget the infamous 1982 Cal-Stanford football game where the band rushed the field to celebrate Stanford’s victory a little too early, allowing Cal to score a last second touchdown and win the game.

What could I possibly imagine to be the embarrassing moment to top all those? Something so traumatizing it need not involve anything more than a cup, a bathroom stall and a complete stranger. That is, being asked for a urine sample for a drug test and being unable … to perform. It’s a lot of pressure. Too much pressure. Stories of athletes taking hours while teammates wait on the bus can make the most unabashed athletes worry.

Unfortunately for DIII student-athletes like me, this embarrassing moment could become a lot more common. Every year student-athletes at Swarthmore and elsewhere are asked to sign a series of documents that give the NCAA permission to drug test. As fall athletes already know, though, this year the forms are a little different.

Students were asked to sign a drug testing permission for a new pilot program for DIII schools. The pilot program, in its second year of administration, includes 120 schools. At each up to 16-20 student-athletes can be randomly drug tested at any point in the year. NCAA is looking not only for performance enhancing drugs like steroids but also social ones such as marijuana. Although Swarthmore is not participating in the pilot, the program if adopted at the close of 2009 would mean that the NCAA could test any DIII athlete at anytime during the year — in season as well as out. This marks a notable departure from the previous policy for DIII schools, which only made athletes eligible to be tested if their team qualified for the NCAA championships.

Nowadays, when one hears “BALCO” as often as “batting average” and no accomplishment of athletic prowess is able to escape suspicion, steroid use has become a reality at every level of athletic competition. It may thus seem like the time to widen the net of testing.
However, the drug testing policy outlined by the new pilot program is not the needed response to the drug use problems of DIII athletes. It reaches into the lives of DIII students far beyond where the NCAA should be allowed.

This new policy for DIII athletes resembles more the policies followed by DI and DII schools, where testing is not limited to in-season athletes and that teams can be tested anytime throughout the season. However, it is important to note the fundamental differences between sports at the DI and DIII levels. By choosing to participate in a DI program, student athletes at those schools agree to have much more of their lives determined by their commitment to their athletic team and thus allow a larger part of their lives to be regulated by the NCAA. DIII athletes, on the other hand, come to school with the idea that although they must be committed first to their team during the season, while out of the season athletics can take a backseat to other activities, thus making the student-athlete just another student. The NCAA has numerous rules that restrict the amount of time DIII students can practice in the off-season specifically because DIII sports are not supposed to be year round programs. Year-round drug testing of student athletes who did not sign up for a year round athletic commitment seems to go against the very guidelines the NCAA has set up for DIII programs and is an unnecessary invasion of students privacy.
Testing like this has further effects on athletes at schools like Swarthmore. Athletic Director Adam Hertz points out that there are both benefits and drawbacks to the new system, but one of these drawbacks is the effect it has on separating out athletes. “This is just another way to further segregate student-athletes from the rest of the student body,” Hertz said. My biggest fear if this pilot program becomes national is the effects it will have at schools like Swarthmore. Here, students’ participation in sports is usually not a priority, and I fear that they will simply not participate if the NCAA tries to control too much of students life with year round drug tests, which test both for steroid use and recreational drug use. In the 2005 NCAA Study of Substance Use Habits of College Student Athletes, a survey given every four years that helps to guide the NCAA drug testing procedures, showed that even without year round drug testing, the number of students who said they used drugs to increase athletic performance was fairly similar to DI and DII programs, which have year-round drug testing.

The survey did show however that recreational drug use by DIII athletes was significantly higher than in other divisions, but that “very few state they use social drugs to improve athletic performance.” Students participating in DIII sports are more likely to use social drugs, such as marijuana, which they will no longer be able to do if the new program is set into effect. I hope that this will not affect the numbers of students who participate in sports here or other DIII institutions, but schools have to recognize the possibility that it might.

As a student-athlete I am very wary of this new program. It is comforting to know that the administration is “not completely convinced that this is the best approach,” as Hertz said, but I hope that these doubts of both students and administrators are expressed and that the NCAA takes note before making this pilot program national.

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