Nashville
For once, the action at the National Collegiate Athletic Association was not about big-time college sports.

At the association's 98th annual meeting, which drew almost 1,800 delegates to the Opryland Resort here, the NCAA's leadership and the national news media focused their attention on the concerns of the 420-odd colleges belonging to Division III. The largest and most diverse of the NCAA's three divisions is also the most restrictive, forbidding its members to give athletics scholarships and placing limits on recruiting and playing seasons that would horrify coaches in Divisions I and II.

Division III has come under much more scrutiny in recent years, however, as college presidents and outside critics, notably the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, have expressed worry that athletes are being pressured to spend too much time engaged in their sports, cutting them off from their studies and other aspects of college life.

At the convention, the Division III Presidents Council proposed a wide-ranging slate of rule changes, to reduce the number of practices and games, prohibit members from awarding athletics scholarships to athletes on teams that compete in Division I, and require members to analyze financial-aid packages given to athletes and other students to ensure that the former are not getting preferential treatment.

Some of the proposals were approved, including a measure to eliminate "redshirting," the practice of allowing athletes to sit out a year and still be eligible for four years of athletics competition. Others will reduce the length of seasons of competition and limit practices and competition in "nonchampionship" seasons, like fall for baseball and spring for soccer.

A Bellwether

However, the division also defeated, by a 318-to-93 vote, a plan to reduce by 10 percent the maximum number of games permitted in all sports. Before that vote several athletics administrators said the proposal was a bellwether for the division: If it failed, that could force some members who wanted to scale back the intensity of their athletes' sports experience to leave Division III. Afterward, though, the division's leaders scoffed at the possibility of a split.

"I don't see anything in the votes taken today that threatens to drive a wedge into the division," John M. McCardell Jr., president of Middlebury College and chairman of the Division III Presidents Council, said at a news conference. "That wasn't the tone of the discussion."

Susan Bassett, director of athletics at William Smith College and chairwoman of the Division III Management Council, said the changes that were made were ones that "schools who might want more restriction can live with," while those "anxious for more playing and practice seasons can be comfortable," too, "because they're relatively modest cuts."

"Division III is solid now," she said.

But Stephen F. Ulrich, commissioner of the Centennial Conference, said the votes might still indicate a split to come. "I have a hard time reading it any other way," he said. "We can all be very sympathetic to schools in a tuition-driven environment, where athletics is a major part of the recruitment effort. But what's hard is for those of us not in that situation to run our programs that way.

"We'll go back to our campuses, and the question will be, did we reform?" he continued. "The answer is yes, we reformed today, but we may think we could have gone farther. The future of Division III has not been cleared up at all."

The division decided to allow eight members, including the Johns Hopkins University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, to continue awarding athletics scholarships in the Division I sports they offer, although it prohibits other institutions from doing so.

Despite concerns that those colleges were violating the Division III philosophy of prohibiting all athletics scholarships, the delegates approved the exception by a vote of 304 to 89, granting the eight permission to continue a practice they have engaged in for decades.

"I'm delighted we got so much support from so many friends," said a relieved William R. Brody, president of Johns Hopkins. He helped lead the campaign against the proposed change, which would have affected the institution's Division I lacrosse team. "It was important to have an overwhelming vote because we'd be concerned this issue would keep coming up year after year," he said. "It reaffirms in a positive sense the waiver."

Immediately after the vote, Mr. Brody said he called the men's lacrosse coach and told him, "We won."

RPI, meanwhile, announced plans to elevate its women's ice-hockey team to Division I and begin awarding scholarships.

Little Controversy in Division I

In other meetings, the NCAA's Division I Board of Directors did not take action on any controversial measures, but it did send several proposals to the division's membership for comments. Among them were a reduction in the minimum number of home football games required for Division I-A membership from five to four, and a plan to allow colleges to give scholarships to incoming athletes to allow them to attend summer programs before their initial enrollment.

In his annual address to the convention, the NCAA's president, Myles Brand, told delegates that college sports was at a crossroads. Colleges should stop dropping men's teams, should hire more women and members of minority groups as coaches and administrators, and should adopt new rules to tie the sports enterprise more closely to the academic enterprise, he said.

"There are strong forces driving athletics programs toward better and better athletics performance," said Mr. Brand, a former president of Indiana University with an academic background in philosophy. "That is understandable and good. Athletics is about winning. But it is essential that the response to these forces be made in a wider context of the mission of universities and colleges."

College presidents, he said, must ensure that despite pressures from fans, boosters, and other outsiders, athletics departments focus on maintaining their integrity and educating their athletes.

During a session on the future of "nonrevenue" sports -- those other than football and men's basketball -- the U.S. Olympic Committee's acting chief executive officer, Jim Scherr, called for the formation of a joint USOC-NCAA task force to find ways to keep colleges from dropping teams, especially in men's sports, that are training grounds for American Olympic teams.

The NCAA and its members have not acted on the proposal. Christine H.B. Grant, former women's athletics director at the University of Iowa, noted that colleges in Divisions II and III have actually added more men's teams than they have dropped, but that many Division I members, especially those with Division I-A football teams, have dropped some men's sports programs.

Ferdinand A. (Andy) Geiger, Ohio State University's athletics director, said that while his institution fielded 35 teams, his department had an $83-million budget, more than three times the average of even the major athletics departments.

"There are a lot of financial issues that cause institutions to drop men's sports," he said, noting that the Buckeyes' eight home football games last fall each generated $4-million to $5-million. "The aspiration that many have to be like that is causing a lot of the problems some schools are experiencing."

Another session at the annual meeting discussed proposals to punish colleges whose athletes fail to make adequate progress toward their degrees in any given year. The Division I governing boards will vote on the proposal in April.

Under the proposal, if an athlete flunks out of college, that institution would not be allowed to transfer his or her scholarship to another athlete until after the first player would have exhausted his or her eligibility.

For example, if a basketball player turned professional after his freshman year and did not bother to complete his second-semester classes, his team would lose a scholarship for three years.

The plan, if approved, would go into effect in the 2005-6 academic year.

A separate proposal calls for the NCAA to begin penalizing colleges and teams if too many of their athletes fail to meet the association's requirements for academic progress. Under those standards, athletes must earn passing grades in courses amounting to at least six credit hours per semester and must complete 40 percent of the requirements for a bachelor's degree by the beginning of the junior year, 60 percent by the beginning of the senior year, and 80 percent by the beginning of the fifth year.

The percentage of athletes meeting those standards at a given college will be called its "Academic Progress Rate," said Todd Turner, a former athletics director at Vanderbilt University who is chairman of the committee that drafted both proposals.

Teams with especially low rates in any given sport may lose scholarships or be denied the chance to compete in championship tournaments, he said, but his panel is still trying to figure out how low would be considered too low.

The Division III decisions, however, were the only momentous events of the gathering. That did not sit well with some of the division's athletics administrators, who were upset that Mr. Brand and other leaders had strenuously advocated all of the proposed changes.

"Did you see that story in USA Today talking about Division I-A football getting a 12th guaranteed game?" asked Michael F. Walsh, athletics director at Washington and Lee University. "And here in Division III, we need to reform ourselves and go down to only nine games?"

The NCAA was ignoring problems in Division I, like the recent relaxation of academic standards for incoming athletes, while forcing Division III to change its path, he complained.

"I'm a skeptic of the word 'reform,'" Mr. Walsh said. "To think reform needs to come in Division III ignores so much of what's going on elsewhere."

NCAA DIVISION III PROPOSALS: HOW THEY VOTED

Following are the rules-change proposals considered by Division III members at the National Collegiate Athletic Association's convention last week, and how the members voted:

Proposal 55. Eliminates an exemption that allowed Division III colleges to award athletic scholarships if they had endowments specifically for that purpose established prior to 1979. Passed, 414-3.

Proposal 56. Requires colleges to submit annual audits comparing financial-aid packages of athletes and other students. Passed, 356-61.

Proposal 57. Eliminates "redshirting," or allowing athletes to sit out of competition for a year and retain their eligibility. Amended to specify that athletes who do not compete in a specific season for a legitimate academic reason, such as class-time conflicts or study abroad, can practice with their team at other times of the year without using a season of eligibility. Passed, 249-163.

Proposal 58. Calls on colleges to ensure that athletic recruiting takes place in conformance with established institutional admissions policies. Passed, 392-22.

Proposal 59. Allows athletes who wish to transfer to another Division III college to contact such institutions without consulting with their current coaches or athletics directors. Passed, 221-195.

Proposal 60. Would have reduced the maximum allowable number of games by 10 percent in all sports and limited the length of the playing season to 18 weeks in the fall and 19 weeks in the winter and spring. Failed, 151-262.

Proposal 61. Limits the length of the playing season to 18 weeks in the fall and 19 weeks in the winter and spring. Passed, 238-180.

Proposal 62. Would have eliminated competition in "nontraditional" seasons, such as fall for baseball or spring for soccer. Failed, 182-233.

Proposal 63. Limits practices in nontraditional seasons to 16 days in most sports, including only one day for competition. Passed, 218-196.

Proposal 64. Eliminates out-of-season workouts in fencing, gymnastics, rifle, rowing, skiing, and swimming. Passed, 315-68.

Proposal 65-1. Forbids Division III institutions from allowing athletes to receive scholarships to compete as a team in Division I. Exceptions will be granted for eight colleges with Division I teams that have scholarships: Clarkson University, Colorado College, Hartwick College, Johns Hopkins University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rutgers University at Newark, the State University of New York at Oneonta, and St. Lawrence University. Passed 296-106.