Academic Counselor for Maryland’s Basketball Team Resigns

Wendy Whittemore, academic counselor for the University of Maryland men’s basketball team last season, resigned Tuesday, saying she feels education is not the top priority for Coach Lefty Driesell.

Five of Driesell’s 12 players flunked out of school last semester. On the average, 1 in 10 athletes at Maryland flunks out every semester, but most simply apply for readmission, attend summer school, retake classes they have failed and continue to play without interruption.

Attention has been focused on Maryland athletes’ academic performances in light of the death last week of Len Bias and subsequent revelations that he was 21 credits short of his degree after four years and did not earn a credit last semester.

Larry Roper, the basketball team’s former academic counselor, who resigned because of academic concerns after the 1984-85 season, said he had talked often with Driesell about his feeling that, at Maryland, eligibility was more important than learning. “The athletic environment is a volatile one, and many of the players may be described as emotional time bombs,” Roper said in his letter of resignation, which he wrote to Driesell on April 11, 1985, with a copy to Athletic Director Dick Dull.

Whittemore, who also was unhappy because the advising duties for the team had been transferred for the summer to another person, said of her resignation from the athletic department: “It comes down to philosophical differences, and being unable to affect changes in the athletic department.”

Roper summed up the philosophical split by stating: “Do you keep them eligible and just build credits, or do you deal with human development? . . . This is something academic advisers in all athletic departments encounter.”

Neither Dull nor Driesell was available for comment Tuesday.

At Maryland, 42% of the football players and 53% of the basketball players who entered as freshmen between 1977 and 1981 have graduated. Both figures exceed the overall university average of 41% and are in line with the 41.6 average of the 63-school College Football Assn.

Nevertheless, Whittemore and Roper, a doctoral candidate and the resident director of a campus dormitory, painted a picture of basketball players who didn’t have the time to be students as well as athletes. Whittemore said team members missed 35 to 40% of classes during the season, which stretches from late November to mid-March.

Whittemore said that all players started the 1985-86 academic term with at least a 2.0 (of a possible 4.0) grade-point average, which fell to about 1.5 after the fall semester and is only slightly better now. She described the team’s grades this past year as “D-plus to C-minus.”

Bias and Tom (Speedy) Jones were the only seniors to be academically dismissed from school, Maryland’s term for flunking out. Whittemore said that Bias stopped attending classes after the fall semester, and Jones said he did the same.

“When you come here, you’ve got the pressures of keeping your grades up so you can play,” Jones said. “But when you get to the last semester of your senior year, there’s no pressure to go to class because you aren’t going to be back to play ball. So it doesn’t matter whether you get the grades or flunk out or not. It really didn’t make a difference.”

The three dismissed players with eligibility remaining are attending summer school, and Dull has said he expects them all to be back and eligible to play. Bias was attending summer school, and Jones remains enrolled.

To stay eligible at Maryland, an athlete needs only to not flunk out and to earn 24 credits annually in a specific degree program. The National Collegiate Athletic Assn. defines 24 credits a year toward a degree as satisfactory progress.

A number of athletes--including about a third of the football team, according to academic counselor Jim Wright--are in a degree program known as General Studies. The university calls General Studies “a flexible alternative educational structure for students who choose not to select a specific major.” The program basically allows students to determine their own curriculum, with “concentrations” of credits in whatever subject the student wishes.

Although Bias said he wanted to major in art or interior design, he chose General Studies, saying it fit his time constraints better. “I’d like to get my degree--that would really mean something,” he said last season. “Then I wouldn’t just be Len Bias the basketball player. People would say, ‘There’s Len Bias. He graduated from Maryland.’ ”

Sources said that Bias occasionally was steered by coaches toward recreation courses and was upset about it.

Whittemore and Roper said they never steered him that way. “Len had a sense of dignity,” Whittemore said. “He was intelligent. He knew it and I knew it. He wouldn’t have looked fondly on that. He wasn’t the type to take the easy way out.”

The basketball team was on the road so much during the spring semester that Whittemore said she sensed academic frustration among her players, especially when they were on the West Coast in mid-March participating in the first and second rounds of the NCAA tournament.

“They were getting anxious, and by that I mean depressed and angry,” she said. “They were saying, ‘How in the world am I going to catch up?’ All of them were feeling like a mountain had been shoveled on them and there was no way they were going to get out from under it. That’s something that I’d like people to know, that they were caring.”

One of the problems, Whittemore said, is that “it’s hard to be two places at once, and that concerns me. Depending on the sport and the schedule, all of our athletes miss class at one time or another. That’s discouraging to me as an educator, but it seems to be accepted by the world at large. . . . My feeling is that they care about class, but they are operating in an environment where it’s hard to get it done.”

Although they would not cite specific instances, both Roper and Whittemore said some of Driesell’s actions are detrimental to the players becoming properly educated and self-sufficient.” Driesell would say that’s a lie because, verbally, Lefty is supportive,” Roper said. “He says, ‘Are they going to class? Are they studying?’ . . . It’s a question of articulated values and actual practices.”