Bringing the B1G Ten Together to Manage Change
In light of the success of the virtual Big Ten Conference hosted by UW–Madison in the spring of 2020, and recognizing the on-going NCAA and Big Ten legislative changes, the Eligibility Staff at the RO thought it would be helpful to bring the Big Ten Registrar team together at least once in a while if not regularly.
Pre-COVID the group would meet on an annual basis usually in the spring and sometimes with snow, with a member institution hosting the meeting and setting the agenda. To keep up the network and see real life people (virtually), we have met monthly and it’s always a meeting we look forward to attending. The time is dedicated to provide a space to both discuss athletic academic eligibility changes and connect personally and professionally.
The Big Ten Registrar team has been pivotal in coordinating these meetings to ensure as many of institutional peers as possible may attend, using polls and schedule sharing. By focusing on the most pertinent issues and remaining cognizant of the academic calendar, the team hopes to help build a stronger community among conference peers to share their expertise. Since beginning the meetings earlier this calendar year, the community has already begun to show success in recreating the value of personal connections in the virtual world.
The Big Ten Registrar “Eligibility Group” has welcomed several new team members into their roles. This group’s monthly meeting provides a chance for those new members to connect with others with similar responsibilities for the first time, which especially helps those members that are the only people on campus responsible for athletic eligibility. This has helped close gaps in knowledge and training, improving new members’ understanding of various eligibility processes, timing, and requirements of their role. On one occasion, the group was able to clarify to a new member that an upcoming visit by the NCAA, something they were told was not an audit, was indeed the NCAA Institutional Data Review = audit . Since UW fairly recently completed a successful audit, the eligibility staff met later with member colleagues to offer tips and tricks .
Additionally, as legislation has continuously been updated throughout the pandemic, the group has been able to share, connect, and develop a common understanding of the potential impacts the changes have on their institution and students. Because of these monthly meetings the UW RO Eligibility Team identified that other members were not getting the latest legislation from their compliance offices and has since been able to provide weekly email updates. These have been greatly appreciated by members and have provided better context and means of discussion during meetings. As some of these topics may be more time sensitive than others, communication remains open, but meetings remain the key place where these are discussed at length.
Beyond keeping up with the latest changes to NCAA and B1G Ten Conference legislation, meetings have allowed time and space to connect on how members conduct business. Through sharing helpful tools additional off-line meetings have been spurred to discuss how they could potentially be implemented elsewhere, including spreadsheets for tracking, queries, degree audit encoding, and a student-athlete database.
In the group’s short time of meeting it has already facilitated a productive and professional network. As legislation changes are likely to impact the next few years, it will be important to continue to meet on a regular basis to ensure all members are up-to-date and share thoughts on how we can all move #Forward.