The survey will cover a broad range of topics regarding the time demands faced by student-athletes, including athletics-related activities, competitions and travel and out-of-season commitments. It will be submitted to the NCAA by Lissa Broome, a committee member and UNC’s faculty athletics representative to the ACC and NCAA.
“There’s going to end up being sport-specific, solution-oriented information derived from the survey that will help to inform any legislative solutions,” Broome said.
Broome said student-athletes are limited to four hours per day and 20 hours per week of athletic activities, according to the NCAA’s Countable Athletically Related Activities rule. But Broome said there have been students who have self-reported up to 43 hours per week.
The committee went through a list of activities, including strength and conditioning workouts, team fundraising, individual skills practice and media activities, and debated which activities athletes should count toward their 20 hours.
Activities garnering debate included sessions with sports psychiatrists, for which Joy Renner, chairperson of the Faculty Athletics Committee, said that individual meetings should be kept private and therefore not counted, while team meetings should be recorded.
The committee discussed proposals from the survey to change the competition season for sports. One possibility is to cut the number of contests allowed for each sport by 10 percent.
“I’m an outlier on this, but I don’t think we should be doing anything that’s non-conference,” Renner said. “I think it’s out of control — the exhibition games, the number of things that we’re doing outside of (what’s) required for our conference.”
Another possibility discussed was for teams to continue playing the same number of contests but to lengthen the season of each sport.
