Prop. 48 Makes Some Freshmen Sit and Think : Frustrated Former St. Monica Player Just Waits for His Turn at Syracuse

Earl Duncan’s team is winning, but it’s just not the same. Sometimes it’s frustrating being a star basketball player when the only incentive for winning the league championship is a T-shirt.

“They’re just students,” Duncan said of his Syracuse University intramural teammates, “guys I’ve met and gotten to be friends with. We’re OK, but sometimes it’s a letdown because you’ll make a pass and they won’t convert it.

“Next year, I know I’ll be playing with the team and the guys will convert it into a dunk or a layup.”

“Next year” has become the motto for Duncan and others who make up the first class of college athletes affected by Proposition 48. Duncan was one of the most highly recruited high school point guards in the country last year.

Now he is one of many college freshmen across the country who concentrate on reading books instead of defenses.

NCAA Bylaw 5-1-(j), more commonly known as Proposition 48, stipulates that a freshman is ineligible for sports competition and practice if his or her college board scores and high school grades in a core of 11 academic subjects fall below a specified minimum. An athlete ruled ineligible can still retain his scholarship but will lose one year of eligibility.

Other options include attending a junior college or paying for the first year while sitting out, thereby retaining four years of athletic eligibility.

It has been years since many of these athletes have been strictly students, with no role on a varsity team. One such athlete is Quinton Burton, of Columbia, Md., who is watching the team at his college, Providence, enjoy an excellent season.

“It has been frustrating,” he said. “It’s fun to watch them succeed, and good to see them progressing. But, hopefully, next year we can do the same thing.”

“It’s a little bit frustrating,” said Syracuse’s Duncan, who is from St. Monica of Santa Monica, Ca. “It’s hard to see the guys you came in with out there playing, and not be able to be a part of it. I’ve held up pretty well, though. I look at it like I just have to hang in there and my time will come.”

When Michigan Coach Bill Frieder signed Rumeal Robinson and Terry Mills last year, he immediately had a great freshman class. However, neither is playing this season because of Proposition 48.

Mills, a 6-10 center from Detroit, said the rule “helps us out and helped us get adjusted to college.” It also offered him a slightly different perspective.

“When I’m in the stands, I can help out other players,” he said. “From the stands, I can see some things they can’t see from the court, and I can relate what I saw.”

Though the rule forbids players from practice, games and travel, it doesn’t mean they can’t pick up a ball. Mills said he thought workouts and pickup games would be enough to avoid hurting his basketball development, but Pittsburgh freshman Chris Gatling isn’t so sure.

“All you can do is hit the books hard, and all of the free time I have--outside of lifting--is for working on my game,” said Gatling, 6-9, from Elizabeth, N.J. “I was killing them (other incoming freshmen) this summer, but now I can tell I’m losing it, because I’m not playing with better competition. I’m playing pickup games, shooting 100 jump shots a day, lifting, but I’m losing a little bit as they go by.”

He said he thinks all freshmen should be ineligible.

“It’s not too bad,” he said. “In fact, it’s not bad at all, because you have a lot more time to study and go to tutor sessions. Rod Brookins (a fellow freshman, who has played in all 26 of Pitt’s games) was my roommate this summer. We’re in a couple classes together, but he’s only in about a third of the classes, because of all the travel. Professors look at you like you’re a jerk. It’s sort of, ‘Why do you have so much privilege to miss my class as opposed to the guy who shows up every day?’

“High school is a lot different from college. In high school you can sleep. It’s eight hours straight, and you really didn’t have to do anything. Teachers give you dittos and write things on the board. In college it’s a lecture, and you have to take notes. In high school, they know you and know you’re going to play basketball.

“They let you slide. If your homework was late, they let you slide. There was one teacher who loved athletes, and if you just showed up to class, you got a B.”

Now Gatling says he would have been better off if things hadn’t been that way.

“Then I would have had to work harder for grades, and it would have made me work hard. But since you know you can get over . . . “

He said the best score he got on the SAT was 690 out of a possible 1600 (400 is given for correctly signing one’s name). He said his grade-point average as a high-school junior was 2.5, and 2.3 as a senior.

“I didn’t do badly in high school,” he said. “What messed me up was the SAT. . . . It was kind of difficult.”

Despite struggling with the test, he said he initially thought he would be eligible at Pitt. When he learned otherwise, he said he “had an important decision to make--whether to go to a junior college, sit out a year or pay a year. My father (who owns a maintenance company) is doing well, and he said he would pay. I told him no. It was my mistake, and I’d have to live with it.”

Through a friend, Randy Werrin, Gatling got a job coaching at a Jewish Community Center. Werrin’s son is on Gatling’s team.

“I tell him to look at me,” Gatling said. “I tell him, ‘I’m not playing because of grades. You’ve got a shot. You’ve got a father who has succeeded as a dentist, making a lot of money. You have more opportunities than I did.’

“I called him the other day and I asked him what he was doing, and he said he was doing nothing. I told him to pick up a book and read, or go to the basement and dribble a ball. Just don’t sit and look into space.

“If I could change anything right now, I wish I could go back to high school and start from scratch,” Gatling said. “Now people tell you you should’ve done this, and you should’ve done that. Once you see that, you wish you could go back and change it.”