NCAA Stiffens Its Drug Stance : College athletics: Officials adopt random year-round testing, which at first will be limited to checking football players for steroids.

Making a move that may not stand up to legal obstacles on several campuses, including five in the Pacific 10, the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. adopted a stronger drug-testing policy Wednesday on the final day of its annual convention.

Included in the package approved by the delegates was a measure stipulating that all Division I-A and Division I-AA football players will be subject to mandatory, year-round, random testing for anabolic steroids and substances used to mask those drugs. A positive test would cause a player to lose his eligibility for one year. The policy is scheduled to remain effective for at least two years, beginning Aug. 1.

But the NCAA may be treading on shaky ground in the Pac-10, where five schools--Stanford, Oregon, Oregon State, Washington and Washington State--currently face legal constraints on administering drug tests to athletes.

“Any time you have a rule that not all schools are subject to, you have a problem--a big one,” said Judith Holland, senior associate athletic director at UCLA.

The delegates authorized year-round drug testing by an overwhelming margin, with 83% voting in favor of the measure, but, for at least the next two years, the year-round tests will be limited to checking football players for steroids.

Athletes in other sports will be tested only before postseason competition, in accordance with the existing NCAA drug-testing plan. Football players also will continue to be tested for all substances before bowl games.

The delegates also approved overwhelmingly a measure that requires the suspension for one calendar year of athletes who test positive for any substances banned by the NCAA.

Previously, athletes who tested positive were merely ruled ineligible for the postseason competition or a bowl game and a 90-day period thereafter.

Further, under the new legislation, a suspended athlete who regains his eligibility and then tests positive for a performance-enhancing drug would lose all remaining eligibility. A second positive test for street drugs such as cocaine and marijuana would cause an athlete to be suspended for another year.

The year-round testing will be limited at first to checking football players for steroids because of the high incidence of positive tests in that area, said Ed Bozik, athletic director at the University of Pittsburgh and a member of the NCAA Executive Committee, a sponsor of the new drug-testing measures. Year-round testing in other sports will be recommended by the Executive Committee for consideration at future conventions, Bozik said.

In Bozik’s view, the year-round, random testing program is a better alternative to testing simply before postseason competition and bowl games, when athletes know the tests are coming. “You’d have to be really damn dumb, or an addict, to fail an announced test,” he said.

Under the plan scheduled to go into effect in August, Bozik said, 36 players from each Division I-A and Division I-AA football program will be tested for steroids at least once a year. Some players could be tested as often as five times a year.

According to Bozik, the plan, which will cover 192 schools, will cost the NCAA about $2 million per year.

He said tests will be administered even during the summer months, although he acknowledged that the NCAA could not test an athlete who wasn’t “physically on campus.”

In truth, the NCAA may not be able to test, period, on some campuses.

Still to be resolved, for instance, is the case of Simone Le Vant, who, while competing for Stanford as a diver, challenged the NCAA’s drug-testing policy in court on the basis that it violated her right to privacy. As a result of that case, a state superior court judge has ruled that the NCAA may not test Stanford athletes for drugs. The NCAA is appealing the ruling.

A similar ruling against NCAA drug-testing in state supreme court in Washington has been interpreted by that state’s attorney general to mean that athletes at the University of Washington and Washington State can’t be tested by the schools for drugs on those campuses without “reasonable suspicion.”

Said Edward Bennett, Washington State’s NCAA faculty representative: “This legislation passed today, we could not abide by.”

Asked what will happen at Washington State when the testing begins, Bennett said: “That’s the question I didn’t get an answer to.”

An attorney general’s opinion in Oregon also requires the University of Oregon and Oregon State to have “reasonable suspicion” before they can test their athletes.

Speaking to the convention on the year-round drug-testing issue, Oregon faculty representative James O’Fallon, a professor of constitutional law, said: “We have the potential for 50 different interpretations of this rule according to the 50 different state constitutions affecting our membership.”

Later, after the measure was approved, O’Fallon said he was unsure how his school will handle the situation.

“The first thing I will do is seek an opinion from the state attorney as to how we’ll deal with it,” he said. “They (the attorney general’s office) may allow it (drug-testing) to be done because it would be the NCAA, not us, doing it. More likely, they’ll look at the link between the institution and the NCAA and say the same opinion applies.”