ChiefsPlanet - MU ** Official Mizzou Basketball Repository Thread **

Missouri football coach sent a congratulatory text message in reply to a high school player updating him on his game the night before.

A sophomore student manager for the football team initiated a public Facebook conversation with a junior prospect and posted photos of recruits at the Oklahoma game last fall.

A university employee linked to a newspaper article touting a high-profile commitment on the school’s official Twitter account.

In each instance, Missouri reported a secondary violation to the NCAA.

It is an occurrence of increasing frequency as schools across the nation contend with a fast-evolving technological landscape and coaches scramble to become as hip as the teenage athletes they are recruiting.

Secondary violations across all levels of the NCAA have jumped by nearly 50 percent over the past five years. At Missouri, according to an open-records request by the Tribune, 32 of the 77 violations the school’s athletic department committed in 2009 and 2010 involved either text-messaging or the Internet.

Most of the infractions sprang from coaches texting recruits, which is banned until a high school athlete signs a letter of intent. But the violations span the techno spectrum, from instant-messaging to Twitter.

While compliance officers once worried about monitoring phone records from office land lines and postal mail, they now must sort through a 400-plus page NCAA rule book and a dizzying whirl of channels coaches are using to communicate with recruits.

“With Facebook and Twitter and eBay, we could have a full-time position just for Internet monitoring, and they’d be 40-hours-a-week busy,” said Mitzi Clayton, Missouri’s assistant athletic director for compliance.

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Coaches at Missouri are buffeted from every direction with information intended to prevent them from committing violations.

The compliance department publishes a monthly newsletter highlighting recent NCAA rule changes while holding group sessions for coaches four times a year. Coaches also must pass an annual exam in order to recruit each season.

They must know, for instance, that communicating with recruits via texts, instant-messaging, chat rooms or message boards is banned under all circumstances. They must know that while Facebook messages to prospects are allowed because they are similar to e-mails, posting on a recruit’s wall violates bylaws barring contact in “open forums.”

“You talk about a staff here that dots their i’s and crosses their t’s,” said first-year women’s basketball Coach Robin Pingeton said.

By definition, secondary violations are “inadvertent or isolated” and provide only a minimal recruiting or competitive advantage. They happen … a lot.

“I think Mitzi’s got me on speed dial, if that answers the question,” MU softball Coach Ehren Earleywine said when asked about the difficulties of navigating this new landscape. “We get written up for things, and we have zero knowledge that we broke a rule. Even if you’re a coach and you study them, the book is really big and it’s hard to know them all. Sometimes your knee-jerk reaction is not a legal one. It’s just to be cordial or courteous, and the next thing you know it’s a violation.”

For instance, the softball program’s violations include a coach providing a free meal to a high school coach the staff member had known since college and mistakenly billing a recruit and her parents $1.04 less than the value of their three meals with the softball staff during an official visit. The recruit made a $1.04 donation to charity to make up for the violation.

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More typical is a coach simply responding to a text from a recruit, a scenario that accounted for at least a dozen of Missouri’s infractions.

Coaches and support staff from Missouri’s 20 athletic programs send an average of 40,000 to 45,000 text messages each month, Clayton said. In the grind of their jobs, they sometimes communicate blindly.

MU reported a secondary violation in April 2009 after a women’s track and field assistant responded to three texts from a recruit who had become ill overnight during her official visit to campus. Even though the prospect initiated the contact to inform the coach of her illness, the entire track and field coaching staff received a one-week ban from having any written or phone contact with all recruits.

Clayton recalled one instance where a wrestling coach replied, “Who is this?” after receiving a text from an unknown number. It was a high school prospect, and the coach reported the violation to compliance.

When the NCAA placed Texas Tech on two years probation this month after coaches sent almost 1,000 text messages to football, softball and golf recruits, former Red Raiders football Coach Mike Leach said he often didn’t know whom he was texting.

“Somebody would say, ‘Merry Christmas,’ and I would say ‘Merry Christmas’ back,” Leach said, according to the NCAA report, “or I would get, ‘Nice win against A&M,’ and I would reply, ‘Thanks.’ ”

The NCAA has little tolerance for such excuses.

A Tigers gymnastics assistant told Missouri’s compliance office that he thought he was using his cell phone’s e-mail application when he sent six texts to a recruit before and during the girl’s official visit. Yet the entire gymnastics staff was banned from calling or writing recruits for six weeks.

“You text, ‘Cool,’ back to someone, and that carries a heftier penalty than an impermissible phone call to a kid where you may have been on the phone for 20 minutes,” Clayton said. “That’s intentional. We’ve gone to the NCAA and asked, ‘Why? Why are you going to consider a character text more wrong than a phone call?’ and they say it’s because there is an absolute ban on text messaging.”

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Some new-age violations are less ambiguous.

Last fall, a football student manager ran afoul on Facebook. He sent several public messages to a high school junior, posted a status update that included the names of three prospects — “It’s a great day to be a tiger,” he wrote — and displayed a photo of recruits inside Memorial Stadium for the Tigers’ hyped Oct. 23 showdown against Oklahoma.

The sophomore, whose duties included helping escort recruits around the football facilities on home football Saturdays, also asked the high school junior he contacted on Facebook whether he planned to attend a Missouri game.

The case was complicated by the manager’s status as a volunteer football coach for his former high school. He traveled to his hometown each Friday night in the fall to either assist his former team or scout a future opponent.

“Therefore, when he made posts on his Facebook account referencing his presence at a high school football game along with the names of prospective student-athletes (names redacted), it gave the appearance that he was at the high school contest in an impermissible capacity,” Lori Franz, Missouri’s faculty athletics representative, wrote in a letter to the NCAA.

Though the student manager was “regretful” and the school confirmed he never tried to recruit an athlete, Missouri reported the violation of three NCAA bylaws. He is no longer with the football program.

A year earlier, Missouri’s baseball program received stiff penalties after a coach sent 27 texts to three different high school players. Although 25 of those messages were sent to a prospect who had already paid his enrollment fee — and would be allowed under new legislation — the NCAA showed little mercy.

The coach was sentenced to 10 hours of community service, and the baseball staff was barred from calling recruits for three months and all on- and off-campus recruiting for one month.

Missouri head baseball Coach Tim Jamieson and several other coaches believe the text ban will soon be lifted.

The NCAA enacted the legislation when text messages were considered bothersome and expensive. Today …

“I’ve got 12-year-old, 13-year-old boys, they don’t even know how to talk on the phone,” Jamieson said. “They just text. I really envision within a short period of time the text rule will go out the door.”

Problem solved — at least until the latest new gadget becomes all the rage.

“Shoot,” Clayton said, “we don’t know how Skype fits in all this. … Technology evolves so quickly that the NCAA isn’t able to respond because it all takes a legislative action.”

Reach David Briggs at dbriggs@columbiatribune.com.