Indianapolis, Indiana * Volume 2, Issue 8 * April 2008

Sports Wagering Education from the Agent, Gambling and Amateurism Activities Staff

Indianapolis, Indiana * 2008 Volume 2, Issue 8 * April 2008

Greetings from the Agent, Gambling and Amateurism Activities department at the NCAA! As we begin to close out another academic year, our staff would like to extend our appreciation to everyone who has made 2007-08 a tremendous year for spreading the NCAA stance on sports wagering. Without your assistance and support, the impact of this education upon student-athletes, coaches and administrators would be greatly decreased. This month's edition focuses on a number of different topics, including a reminder on educating student-athletes before they leave campus for the summer. As always, your feedback on the newsletter and NCAA sports wagering programs is both welcomed and appreciated.

Hot Topic – The controversy involving Tim Donaghy, former National Basketball Association (NBA) referee, resurfaced recently when Thomas Martino, a high school classmate of Donaghy and a recipient of Donaghy's confidential NBA information, plead guilty to conspiracy to engage in wire fraud. The New York Times reported that Martino admitted to paying Donaghy, a former NBA referee, for privileged sports wagering information and "intentionally defrauding the league (NBA) of its 'intangible right to honest services.'" Based on the article, from December 2006 to April 2007 Donaghy provided Martino with inside betting information on NBA basketball games. Donaghy supplied Martino with "picks" about which teams would win based on information not available to the general public. Donaghy relayed his picks to Martino via telephone calls using coded language. James Battista, another high school classmate of Donaghy and a professional gambler, was also allegedly involved in the exchange of inside NBA information. On April 21, 2008, Battista is expected to plead guilty to criminal charges similar to those levied against Martino. Tim Donaghy has already plead guilty to the felony charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to engage in illegal interstate wagering. During Donaghy's 13 year career as an NBA referee he officiated 772 regular season games and 20 playoff games. Not only did Donaghy provide illegal tips to other betters for compensation but he also admitted to placing wagers on NBA games. Donaghy is scheduled to be sentenced on May 30, and faces up to a maximum of 25 years in prison. The NCAA strives to prevent occurrences such as the one described above by conducting background checks on all referees who officiate NCAA Division I Championships in men's and women's basketball, baseball and men's ice hockey, as well as postseason football bowl games. The AGA staff

has also been active in educating NCAA officials on the dangers of sports wagering by attending official's clinics with FBI agents, and creating educational brochures for officials of baseball, ice hockey and basketball.

Educational Tip The AGA staff believes that is very important to make sure that student-athletes, coaches and administrators realize that the provisions of NCAA sports wagering legislation continue to apply to them even though they might be off-campus during the summer. With that in mind, the AGA staff would like to remind compliance departments to educate student-athletes, coaches, and administrators about upholding the NCAA sports wagering legislation during the summer months. Even though the school year has concluded these individuals are responsible for maintaining compliance with NCAA sports wagering bylaws. Among other methods to educate its constituents, compliance departments may consider sending out e-mail reminders during the summer to encourage student-athletes, coaches and administrators not to wager on any sporting event in which the NCAA holds a championship. One item that may be included in this memorandum is a warning that student-athletes, coaches and administrators may not gamble on any major league baseball games. In addition, we encourage compliance departments to meet with their student-athletes to conduct end of the year compliance sessions, which could include a focus on Bylaw 10.3. Guest Columnist – This month's guest column first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education on March 3, 2008, and has been reprinted with the permission of its author, Dr. George S. McLellan. Dr. McLellan is the vice chancellor for student affairs at Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne. This article focuses on what college campuses can do to stem the tide of gambling in their communities. This article focuses on specific solutions to addressing these issues.

What Colleges Can Do About Student Gambling By GEORGE S. MCCLELLAN Several years ago, as I was reading through the postings on an Internet bulletin board on blackjack, I came across a message asking for information on where one could find $25 or $50 Texas Hold 'em games. Today one can find such a high-stakes poker game online, in a nearby casino, at some guy's house, or in any number of college residence halls or fraternities, but back then they were less ubiquitous. What caught my eye about the message, however, was not so much the topic as the source: The message had been posted using an e-mail address at my own university. After a bit of sleuthing, I discovered that the account belonged to one of our undergraduates. That's the day I began wondering about student involvement in gambling. What I learned surprised me, and the subsequent growth of gambling among students — along with the seeming ambivalence to it on the part of many in higher education — has given me more cause for questions than for comfort. The history of gambling in the United States through the late 20th century has been described by I. Nelson Rose, a law professor at Whitter Law School and a scholar in gambling studies, as consisting of three waves of activity: the colonial period to the mid-19th century, the conclusion of the Civil War to the early years of the 20th century, and the Great Depression to the early 1990s. Ken Winters, of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, who is a leader in gambling research, and I have suggested that a fourth wave of gambling began in this country in the mid-1990s, spurred by rapid development in tribal-controlled gaming and increases in the number of states permitting casino gambling. That wave has grown to vast proportions with the advent of online gambling, an increase in the number of casinos, and the explosive growth of poker, both online and at brick-and-mortar venues. While there is some evidence that a contraction may have begun, there is little doubt that the eventual result of the fourth wave will be expanded gambling activity across the nation.

In the mid-1970s, it was estimated that the lifetime prevalence of gambling among adults in the United States was just above 60 percent, but by the mid-1990s, a similar study indicated the rate had grown to over 80 percent. More-recent data are lacking, but it seems reasonable to assume that the rate may well have increased in light of the growth of gambling activity in the fourth wave. Not surprisingly, there has been a concurrent increase in gambling activity by college students. The 2007 "National Annenberg Survey of Youth" reports that 40 percent of college students and more than half of all college men gamble at least monthly, and that 10 percent of college students do so on a weekly basis. While Internet gambling among college students has receded from its peak activity of a year ago, the Annenberg study still indicates that nearly 400,000 college students gamble online every month. A few students have found gambling to be a lucrative enterprise, and their successes are highlighted by gaming interests and hailed in the popular media. Watch any of the televised poker shows found on network and cable stations, and you will soon hear that one or more of the players at the table are students from this or that college. The touting of their successes serves the interests of the gaming industry, which sees two markets — women and college students — as central to its continued growth in the United States. It's not surprising, therefore, that one need not look far to find student-marketing representatives or interns for various gambling enterprises on campuses across the country. Many students are gambling in ways that present no risk for them other than the loss of discretionary funds. Most of us in higher education have not heard much about or from those students in terms of their gambling while in college. For other students, however, gambling may constitute violations of campus policy, athleticsassociation rules, or the law — for which they could suffer varying consequences. Still others exhibit behavior that classifies them as problem or pathological gamblers: From 5 percent to 9 percent of male students and 1 percent to 2 percent of female students fit that category. Just as the news media have chronicled the successes of a few college students in the gambling realm, so too have they reported on the disasters that gambling has brought into people's lives. Meng-Ju (Mark) Wu, a 19year-old freshman at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, lost $15,000 in May and June of 2003. He went to his alleged bookie's apartment and shot dead three men: the alleged bookie and his two housemates. At age 21, while awaiting trial in a county jail, Wu hung himself. In February 2006, Joseph Kupchik, a 19-year-old accounting student at Cuyahoga Community College, in Ohio, stabbed himself in the chest and jumped to his death from a parking garage after suffering substantial losses in online gambling. Greg Hogan Jr., president of his sophomore class at Lehigh University, was 19 when he robbed a bank to try to satisfy gambling debts from online poker. He had hoped that what he stole would become a large enough stake to win back what he owed. Those are among the most dramatic examples of students brought to ruin as a result of pathological gambling. No doubt the story of 18-year-old Jeff Simon, who spoke with a reporter from The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2006 about struggling to stay in college in Pittsburgh under the weight of debts from online gambling, is more representative of the many students whose dreams are threatened, deferred, or defeated as a result of gambling. That there is an intersection between gambling and higher education is nothing new. Some of the first colonial colleges were financed, at least in part, from lottery proceeds, and gambling on college athletics is as old as college athletics itself. States have turned to lottery revenues or taxes on other forms of gambling for decades to help support higher education. Today, colleges use various forms of gambling to help raise money for scholarships, student programs, and other worthy causes. We have licensing agreements allowing the use of institutional logos on gambling paraphernalia. We are the unwitting conduits for online gambling through our computing infrastructure. We are the focus of a substantial portion of the legal and illegal sports betting in the United States. We house research centers focused on various aspects of gambling, offer academic programs to prepare individuals for careers in casinos and casino management, and preside over professional programs that train counselors to deal with gambling addiction. Most notably, we are linked to gambling through the students we serve. For them gambling is legal, socially acceptable, and increasingly popular as a recreational activity. How has higher education responded to the problems and perils that excessive gambling among students can create? During the 1990s, college counselors reported a surge in students seeking help for gambling-related

problems. Gambling-related issues were identified as an emerging area of concern for judicial offers. The National Association of Student Personnel Administrators formed a gambling task force, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association conducted an extensive survey of student-athletes regarding gambling behavior. The Chronicle has run several articles on gambling-related issues. A few articles on college gambling have appeared in peer-reviewed journals of higher education, and Jossey-Bass recently published my monograph, Gambling on Campus: New Directions for Student Services. Nonetheless, a recent study showed that few colleges have policies or programs explicitly focused on gambling behavior, and it appears that college gambling remains well under the radar for many of us. Model programs, however, are emerging. Researchers at Southern Methodist University recently undertook a qualitative study to better understand student choices with regard to gambling behavior. At the University of Florida and the University of Alabama, campus-wide teams are developing assessment plans, education and intervention programs, and policy recommendations. Project ACE, a coalition of organizations in southwestern North Dakota that includes Dickinson State University, is working with a wide array of partners to deal with a set of interrelated social issues that inhibit the success of young people in the area. The group uses a community-based approach, focusing on identifying and using community assets — including police enforcement and training programs — to deal with gambling, while pursuing concrete goals such as legislation. Both Oregon and Missouri have carried out statewide gambling-education and gambling-intervention programs in their higher-education systems. Those programs are examples of creative, comprehensive approaches toward partnerships to deal with gambling on campuses. Other suggestions for colleges include: Develop an advisory committee to encourage gambling-education programs and respond to gamblingrelated incidents, or ask an existing group dealing with similar issues to take on that responsibility. Develop an ethical and practical institutional framework for handling gambling issues. Review conduct policies on gambling and campus programming — raffles as fund raisers, casino nights, bus trips to local casinos — to make sure they are in line with the institution's mission and values as well as with state and local laws. Also make sure that student-conduct policies make explicit reference to institutional expectations about gambling behavior. Include questions on gambling and students' related needs in focus groups and surveys. Integrate information related to gambling behavior into existing education programs, and information on problem gambling into programs to prevent and treat addiction among students. Distribute a list of local referral resources for off-campus assistance, including Gamblers Anonymous and similar programs, and financial counseling. Provide students and staff and faculty members with information concerning rates of participation in gambling and the prevalence of pathological gambling, consequences of illegal gambling, consequences of problem gambling, techniques for spotting potential problem and pathological gambling, and avenues for reporting concerns they may have about campus gambling. Demonstrate to other campus professionals the relationship between problem gambling and the areas for which they are responsible. Explore behavioral, legal, political, and health dimensions when responding to campus gambling issues. Attend sessions on gambling at state, regional, and national conferences to become educated on the issue. A blind is a bet that a poker player is forced to make once every eight or nine hands when playing Texas Hold 'em, a game that has made gamblers, once viewed as degenerates, into demigods in the popular culture. Most young people can tell you that if you are at the table, then you are going to have to post your blinds, and that how you play your blinds is integral to how well you do at the table. We in higher education are at the table of the social phenomenon that is the fourth wave of gambling. How will we play the blind?

Special Recognition University of Kansas Within each issue of this newsletter, the AGA staff will highlight institutions that have conducted creative programs for educating their student-athletes, coaches and administrators on the NCAA's stance on sports wagering or have maintained a consistent approach to spreading positive messages regarding the dangers of problem gambling. To nominate yourself or another institution, please contact John Shukie at [email protected], and provide reasons why you believe this institution is worthy of recognition. The thirteenth recipient of AGA Sports Wagering Education Special Recognition is the University of Kansas (Kansas).

It may be appropriate that the University of Kansas (Kansas) is the most recent recipient of Special Recognition from the AGA staff. Coming off of a Division I men's basketball championship, Kansas' athletics department deserves to be recognized for its sports wagering awareness campaign as well. Kansas has developed some unique practices for disseminating anti-gambling messages to its student-athletes, coaches, administrators, and the community at-large. If you read last month's edition, you saw the emphasis that Kansas' Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) has been putting on this issue. This connection between the compliance department and the campus SAAC is a great example of how athletics departments can enlist the assistance, and perhaps most importantly, the creativity of its student-athletes to help spread this message. Your campus SAAC group may have a unique viewpoint on these issues, and will likely understand what messages will be most effective for reaching your intended audience of student-athletes.

The photograph above was used as a screen saver on all computers in the student-athlete academic support services area, and was also placed on the monitor at the main entrance to the athletics department. This

highlights another practice that the AGA staff highly recommends: placing Don't Bet On It materials in hightraffic areas. Whether it is the Don't Bet On It poster, or other creative pieces like the Kansas materials shown, placing these objects in highly visible areas will help both awareness, and perhaps further conversation regarding the messages. During its most recent educational campaign, the athletics department allowed the student-athletes to vote on what type of product they would like to distribute with the "Don't Bet On It" logo. The student-athletes chose coffee mugs with the Don't Bet On It logo on one side and the Kansas logo on the opposite. By providing the student-athletes with a choice on the product created, the athletics department provided them with some ownership in the process, which can be integral to instilling interest in the program. Finally, the Don't Bet On It coffee mug was also distributed with a bookmark sized reminder of sports wagering legislation to be used during compliance education meetings. This is another example of how compliance departments can present materials that deal with sports wagering in a creative and functional way to its studentathletes. . The AGA staff encourages all athletics departments to follow Kansas' lead, and think of creative ways to disseminate sports wagering educational information to its student-athletes, coaches and administrators.

Farewell to Deana Garner

It is with both great sadness and excitement that the AGA staff announces that Deana Garner has accepted a position with the National Football League as NFL Director - Player Security Services. Her last day at the national office will be April 25. It is hard to describe how much Deana has meant to our department and the NCAA as a whole. Not only do we consider her to be an integral part of the AGA team, but we also consider her to be a great friend. She will surely be missed.

For additional information regarding any of the material in this newsletter, if you have ideas that you would like to share for a future newsletter or if you have any questions or concerns regarding sports wagering on your campus or within you conference, please contact the AGA staff. Agent, Gambling and Amateurism Activities Staff

Rachel Newman - Director [email protected]

John Shukie - Assistant Director [email protected]

Deana Garner - Associate Director [email protected]

Suzanne Brickell Administrative Assistant [email protected]

Angie Cretors - Assistant Director [email protected]