Book by benjamin shell

Adventures of Athletes: The NCAA Journey Born and raised in the Bay Area, Benjamin Shell is currently a junior at Freestyle Academy and Los Altos High School. From a young age, Ben has been into music as his Dad put him on to Classic Rock and the music of his time. As Ben got older, he fell in love with Hip-Hop upon discovering Kanye West by downloading (maybe illegally) his “Watch The Throne� album with Jay-Z. From love at first listen, Ben knew what he wanted to do with my life; become the next Kanye. He then proceeded to learn how to make his own beats and taught himself how to write songs, hell-bent on reaching his mountainous goal. About 5 years later, his philosophy still remains that if he puts the work in, his dream can be achieved. When Ben is not working on my music, he can be found working out at the gym, playing soccer, working at his job, watching movies with his family, and or hanging out with his homies.

Benjamin Shell

Adventures of Athletes: The NCAA Journey

Benjamin Shell

Stanford Main Quad (right)

Dedication

To Mom, Dad, Natalie, Meredith, and Christopher.

Thank you for pushing me to be the best I can be.

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Stanford runner at the Stanford Invitational (right)

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Heather Owen for connecting me with the rest of my interviewees and helping me throughout the production of this project. I would also like to thank the rest of my interviewees - Bernard Muir, Lorne Robertson, and Kaylee Johnson - for taking the time out of their days to sit down with me and discuss the NCAA. I would like to thank my Mom and Dad for their feedback and advice throughout the whole process. I would also like to thank Mr. Greco, Mr. Flo and Ms. P for their gracious help to get me over the hurdles of this project.

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1 1 Introduction

1 3 History of the NCAA

1 6 Rules & Regulations

2 2 The Student Athlete of Yesterday

2 9 The Student Athlete of Today

3 2 Conclusion

Table of Contents

9 Preface

Stanford Memorial Court (right)

Preface

For the Documentary project at Freestyle Academy, we were asked to explore and find interesting ways to express the untold stories of our community. After much brainstorming with my family, I landed on NCAA athletics at Stanford. I have grown up going to Stanford sporting events and watching NCAA athletics yet knew little about the organization and wanted to learn more. Consequently, I wanted to educate people on what the NCAA is and provide an insight into the organization’s significance. As I gathered research and conducted interviews, I became enthralled with the stories of administrators and leaders within the organization. As a result, in addition to educating my readers on the NCAA, I also wanted to tell the stories of selected Stanford people involved with the NCAA. After landing on the NCAA as my topic, I connected with Heather Owen in the athletic department at Stanford and the project took off from there. One of the challenges of this project was walking away from my work. Among the various aspects of the project, it was challenging to be able to move on and say, “Okay, this part is done.” The biggest life lesson that this production taught me was that my hard work truly pays off. If you put the work in, anything can be achieved.

And while that sounds like a poster in a 5th-grade classroom, I truly believe it now. Ultimately, this is a lesson that I can apply to all aspects of my life, whether it is my own dreams or my school work.

To the reader, I hope you take away a better understanding of the NCAA and an appreciation for the unique stories of the individuals involved in college sports. Enjoy.

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her office (left)

In troduction

Somewhere in Tennessee, circa 1996, a group of rowdy college women pile into a restaurant.

After beating the No. 2 University of Tennessee, a big rival, by a score of 90 to 72, these athletes are exuberant and loud, and their coaches are trying to reign them in. They are members of the Stanford Women’s Basketball team. Among these student-athletes is Heather Owen, a forward in her Junior year who recalls the experience: “I remember being obnoxiously loud.” Now, more than 20 years later, Heather is back at Stanford as a Senior Associate Athletic Director. As a former student-athlete and now an administrator, Owen has been a part of the NCAA for almost two decades.

The NCAA has come a long way since its founding over a century ago, now hitting a peak of more than 460,000 student-athletes participating across more 1,200 schools (“Student-Athletes”). Not only has the organization grown in the number of participants, but it has also expanded commercially.

For example, in 2013, the NCAA brought in over $684 million dollars in TV revenue from the Men’s basketball tournament, March Madness (“NCAA March Madness Tournament TV Revenue 1980-2013 | Statistic”) and in 2016, more than 38 million people attended Division I football games (“NCAA College Football Games Division I FBS Attendance 2003-2016 | Statistic”). All the while, the NCAA has had its rough patches. Recently, more than 20 of the NCAA’s schools were cited for breaking NCAA rules, as a result of an FBI investigation into corruption within men’s basketball. Some of these schools included Duke, North Carolina, and Kentucky, all known for being powerhouse basketball programs (“Report: FBI Probe into NCAA Corruption Identifies Possible Violations by Basketball Powers” ). The investigation revealed cash advancements between sports agents and NCAA student-athletes as well as entertainment and travel expenses paid by said agents, all of which are major NCAA violations. Sorting through the immense size and clout of the NCAA, I looked to understand certain individuals within the organization, along with their roles and jobs. Through her insight and connections, Owen would be my guide for diving into a high-level understanding of the NCAA as seen through Stanford University and the Heather Owen working in stories of those affiliated with college sports.

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H i story NCAA Headquarters in Indianapolis Photo courtesy of the Shildan Group

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History The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) was founded as a nonprofit organization by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. President Roosevelt’s motivation for the founding of the institution was to implement standardized safety rules and regulations for college football. As an avid fan of the sport, Roosevelt wanted to make it safer. The sport had few regulations that were rarely enforced. In the 1905 season alone, 18 college and amateur players died. As violence in the sport increased, people began to call for a ban on football. In response, the President of Harvard, Charles W. Eliot, stated that ‘No sport is wholesome in which ungenerous or mean acts which President Theodore Roosevelt easily escape detection contribute to victory, whether such acts be occasional, Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress accidental, or habitual’ (“President Eliot on Football”). To deal with the concerns, Roosevelt met with athletic leaders from 13 schools, including Harvard, and developed the Intercollegiate Athletic Association, which would later become the NCAA. More than a century later, President Roosevelt’s organization oversees over 460,000 athletes across America. Although Roosevelt was influential in the organization’s founding, the NCAA known today was largely shaped by Walter Byers.

After working in a New York news agency, Byers took a job as the assistant to the then Big Ten Commissioner, Kenneth Wilson, in 1947. To help makes ends meet, he also worked as the secretary of the NCAA, which, at the time, was located in a section of one of the Big Ten buildings. After a large scandal in 1951, Wilson put Byers in charge of the organization, making him the NCAA’s first full-time employee. According to Wayne Duke, Byers’ first full-time staff member, “He gave me a three-word guideline: Performance commands respect” (Rhoden). Byers ruled with an iron hand, and he wanted the organization to function in the same manner. Byers coined the term “student-athlete” to emphasize the organization’s pledge to amateurism as the foundation of the structure. At the same time, he also encouraged the commercialization of the organization, especially through the “NCAA’s crown jewel” (Muir), March Madness. While providing much needed revenue and visibility, the increased commercialization would ultimately lead the NCAA

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into instances of corruption and fraud. Over four decades, Byers turned the small, loosely organized NCAA into a powerful governing institution with over 1,200 schools in its membership.

Ironically, as influential as Bryers as was in the NCAA, he eventually turned on his own organization. As Byers sat in the courtroom during the National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, this shift began. The case debated whether or not the NCAA violated the Sherman Act with regard to the use of TV rights by the member institutions. The Supreme Court ruled against the NCAA finding the organization guilty of violating the Sherman Act. Observing during this case, Byers watched as university presidents, under oath, described their athletic programs as commercial enterprises. Byers believed that these presidents, coaches, and athletic directors had undermined his ambition to “keep college athletics more a student activity than a profession” (Nocera).

Having lost the Regents case, Byers’ iron hand on college sports loosened for the first time. Disgruntled with the organization, Byers turned against his organization and continued to “fight” and advocate against the NCAA until his death in 2015.

Walter Byers circa 1951

Photo courtesy of the Associated Press

‘No sport is wholesome in which ungenerous or mean acts which easily escape detection contribute to victory, whether such acts be occasional, accidental, or habitual’ -Charles W. Eliot 15

Rules & Regulations

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NCAA rulebook (right)

Rules & Regulations To better understand Byers’ creation, I turned to Lorne Robertson, Associate Athletic Director for NCAA Compliance at Stanford. Raised in Michigan, he attended Eastern Michigan University’s law school, knowing he wanted to work inside of athletics but not as an agent. Robertson identified NCAA compliance relatively quickly as a career path for him. After law school, Robertson took a job as a law clerk at an entrepreneurial company and quickly rose to be the general counsel. After about 5 years, his passion to pursue a career in athletics remained, but he was having a hard time breaking in. Looking back on this experience, Robertson recalls that “the hardest [part] was getting into [sic] industry”. After applying for internships at athletic departments across the nation and being told he was “overqualified”, Robertson went back to his alma mater. Aware that they had endured a major violation, Robertson knew that there was going to be a need for new staff. As a result, Robertson eventually landed a job as a graduate assistant at the athletics department, transitioning from running the legal department of a $300 million dollar company to holding a position usually given to graduate students. Luckily, he had a great team behind him, as he recalls: “I have a wonderful wife who is unbelievably supportive. She married a general counsel and then she got a graduate assistant” (Robertson). They both took second jobs to help meet their financial commitments. But it was all with a plan. Robertson’s hard work, enduring passion, and new skill sets led to his promotion to a full-time job at Eastern Michigan University. In time, Robertson would go even further, running the compliance department at Tulane University in New Orleans and eventually holding the same position at Stanford. According to Robertson, “there is no better athletic department in the country than Stanford”. From the 36 sports that Stanford has to over 1,000 student-athletes, Stanford’s compliance department must be able to keep up with the high level of the school’s athletics. At the helm of compliance at Stanford, Robertson spent time with me to help me understand the structure of the NCAA and the compliance process.

According to the NCAA’s website, the “penalties should be sufficient to deter an institution from breaking the rules again and should remove any competitive advantage that may have been gained by cheating” (“Enforcement Process: Penalties”). How exactly are these deterrents created? To better understand how the rules are conceived, a basic understanding

“There is no better athletic department in the country than Stanford” -Lorne Robertson

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Lorne Robertson of the NCAA structure is helpful. The NCAA is an organization composed of the institutions that it oversees; these are known as the “members” or the “membership”. This membership functions much like a democracy. New legislation is proposed by coaches or coaches’ groups within a specific sport, and then members vote on the suggested legislation at the yearly national convention. In rare cases, the NCAA can also implement emergency legislation. Most recently a new rule was implemented that outlawed full contact two-a-days (when the team trains on two separate occasions on the same day with full contact) in the preseason for football in part to protect the student-athletes’ health. Unlike other laws, the emergency legislation does not go through the membership to be voted on. According to Robertson, the recent football two-a-day legislation came from a “working group at the NCAA”. Once a new rule is passed, emergency or not, it is then added to the rulebook in the subsequent year.

NCAA members are required to comply with the rules, but the approach to compliance varies from institution to institution. At Stanford, the compliance department consists of 7 members, including Robertson, with each member in charge of a designated set of NCAA bylaws. According to Robertson, for example, “USC has individual compliance people assigned to a sport.” With 36 sports at

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Rules & Regulations Stanford, Robertson and his staff work very hard to oversee compliance. Robertson’s compliance philosophy is to ask the coaches and student-athletes what they want to achieve. From there, Robertson and his staff point out the hurdles that may be in the way of those goals and help to remove those hurdles. Robertson and his team execute with that philosophy as their objective, but with 36 different sports, violations are bound to slip through.

The NCAA’s enforcement of the rules functions on a self-reporting basis. Institutions are to put in monitoring procedures that discover violations, and then those violations are to be self-reported. Stanford, for example, has monitoring devices to track the number of hours of practice and devices to monitor the calls of coaches to recruits. Understanding the various levels of violations helps to grasp the compliance process. There are 4 levels of violations. Violations 3 and 4 are minor violations. Level 3 violations are reported to the NCAA by the violating institutions’ compliance department via the NCAA’s online reporting system. The report consists of which bylaw was broken, the punishment designated by the institution, and what the institution is doing about it.

Certain violations have a prescribed penalty. For example, say a Stanford coach calls a recruit before they are allowed to call them (there are specific timelines for when coaches can call a high school athlete depending on the sport). The penalty, more often than not, is a two-for-one-get back. Stanford would wait two weeks after they are legally allowed to call the recruit as their punishment. The twofor-one get back is common in a lot of minor violations as the norm penalty. Level 4 violations are simply reported to the institution’s conference. In the case of Stanford, that conference is the Pac-12. These minor violations are not widely covered as they are more frequent and not of a high caliber. An example of a minor violation would be calling a recruit before you are allowed too.

Level 1 and 2 violations are more serious. For these violations, the NCAA Enforcement Staff (the enforcement branch of the NCAA) will launch an investigation into the institution. The staff will then present their findings of which rule was broken and what the penalty should be to the Infractions Committee, which according to the NCAA’s website is “an independent administrative body charged with deciding infraction cases involving NCAA member institutions and their employees” (“Division I Committee on Infractions”). The Infractions Committee agrees or disagrees with the findings of the investigation and the penalty. However, if the institution believes that they were not in the wrong or disagrees with the investigation’s findings, the institution and the Enforcement Staff can both present their findings and arguments to the Infractions Committee, which will then decide whether or not there were infractions. Any infraction can become a Level 1 violation if there was intent to break the rule. The organizing principle of the NCAA was to establish rules to promote the safety of the student-athletes. These rules help formulate the student-athlete experience of today and of the past.

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Javelin Thrower at the Stanford Invitational

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The Student-Athlete of Yesterday

Hoover Tower at Stanford (right) 22

Yesterday “Being here as a college athlete at Stanford was hands down the best” -Heather Owen

Growing up in northern Idaho, Heather Owen made her way to Stanford during the 90s as a basketball recruit. She recalls the experience of coming to Stanford on a recruiting trip and Coach Vanderveer saying, ‘This is Stanford. There is the gym. We eat over there. My office is up here’ (Owen). Coach Vanderveer’s bluntness and straightforwardness appealed to Owen. She recalls going to other schools for a recruitment trip, and they would have her face posted on the jumbotron. To her, that wasn’t realistic: “When you join a team wherever it may be and you go to practice, you’re not gonna walk into the gym and have your face on the jumbotron” (Owen). Once she landed at Stanford, Owen was updated annually on the NCAA rules during an educational summit. Teams would pile into Kissick, an auditorium on campus, to hear the rules that applied to them and their respective sport. The rule of thumb was: if something feels weird, say something. Though simple, this is similar to the compliance process of today as it relies on self-reporting of violations of the rules.

During her four years at Stanford, Owen attended multiple Final Fours. She found that she “was better when stretched and uncomfortable” (Owen), which she believes is a trend for most student-athletes. She believes that student-athletes are the ultimate coupling of two pursuits, academics and athletics, especially at Stanford. Owen recalls that “being here as a college athlete at Stanford was hands down the best” (Owen).

Graduating in ‘98, Owen was drafted into the American Basketball League, a grassroots effort out of Palo Alto. The league collapsed the year she joined and she proceeded to play in Europe, eventually coming back around to the WNBA for two years and playing for the Washington Mystics. Unfortunately, a knee injury cut her career short. She had the option to try an experimental surgery, but that just was not something she wanted to put herself through. She recalls the doctor telling her, ‘if you wanna bend down later in life and pick your kid up, you should probably call it a day’ (Owen).

During her studies at Stanford, Owen loved any class that had any smell of law to it. Owen proceeded to go to law school at Santa Clara University, even though she didn’t really want to be a lawyer. She at least thought she would enjoy the academic pursuit – a true student-athlete. After graduating from law school, Owen began practicing law and continued to practice law for a couple years. But she knew she did not wish to work 80 hour weeks for the rest of her life, and she kept recalling the satisfaction 24

Image courtesy of Trading Card Database

Image courtesy of Trading Card Database

and joy she felt playing basketball in college. To hope to achieve that same level of satisfaction, Owen returned to work at her alma mater. Owen is now a Senior Associate Athletics Director with a focus in development and fundraising. On top of that, Owen also oversees Men’s Golf, Women’s Basketball, and Field Hockey.

Heather Owen 25

Yesterday Another former NCAA athlete and co-worker is Bernard Muir, the Athletic Director of Stanford. Growing up in Gainesville Florida, Muir started his involvement with the NCAA by playing basketball at Brown University. Though not a highly recruited athlete, he recalls his Mother always saying “that if you had the opportunity to go to an Ivy, you gotta fulfill that dream and go” (Muir).

Before coming to work at Stanford as the athletic director, Bernard worked for the NCAA itself. He served as an Assistant Director of Operations for the Division I Men’s Basketball National Championship and eventually the Director of Operations for the same championship. As assistant director, he worked with a staff year round on the National Championship. Muir’s role was to go to the 13 sites of that year’s championship and make sure everyone was prepared. He was involved in ticketing, officiating, ordering equipment, and putting on and coordinating events for the basketball committee and staff. Or as Muir puts it, he was “involved in all the nuts and bolts in putting on a championship” (Muir). His philosophy was that it did not matter if you were a number 1 seed or a number 16 seed; you were to be treated to the same experience and that experience needed to be the best that it can be. And when March rolled around, Muir recalls that it was incredibly rewarding to see the fruits of your labor unfold and provide an opportunity for teams to compete at the highest level. Muir’s experience in the NCAA provided him with a strong network within college sports and a robust learning environment for dealing with people. Muir described that his experience gave “a really broad perspective on what college [sic] sport is all about and the people who are involved in administering college sports” (Muir).

Now at Stanford, Muir continues his interactions with the NCAA, not only as Stanford’s Athletic Director but also Bernard Muir (left) Photo courtesy of Brown University as a member on the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee.

According to the NCAA’s website, there are “more than 150 26

committees with almost 1,500 committee members from NCAA institutions and conferences” (“Committees”). On the Men’s Basketball Committee, Muir works with 9 other committee members to oversee the National Championship with each member serving a 5-year term. The committee’s role consists of selection, seeding, bracketing the prospective teams, and site selection for the championship. Or as Muir describes the committee, the Bernard Muir objective is to develop “the best championship field possible based on our selection process” (Muir).

How does a representative join an NCAA committee? First, you have to be nominated by your conference, and the NCAA membership has put in place particular criteria for the nomination process. For example, the committees should have a balance between the 32 conferences across the nation in order to prevent too many individuals from one region. In the case of Muir, there was a West coast opening and he was nominated by the Pac-12 to the committee. Muir is almost at the end of his 5-year term as a committee member. Looking back on his experience, it has been surreal, especially as a former basketball student-athlete.

That being said, Muir is looking forward to resuming his day job as the committee is a quite the endeavor, though an extremely rewarding one.

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The Student-Athlete of Today

Runners at the Stanford Invitational (left) 29

Today Now more than a century since the founding, the NCAA is the organization for college sports in America. While Owen and Muir provided great insight into the NCAA of the recent past, Kaylee Johnson, a senior at Stanford, provided me with insight into the NCAA and the student-athlete of today. Growing up in Wyoming, Johnson made her way to Stanford as a women’s basketball recruit.

During her childhood, Johnson was never the top athlete among her peers, or at least she didn’t see it that way: “I was never the best player ever in any sense” (Johnson). That being said, she definitely had the drive. In order to get exposure, Johnson knew she had to play for an Amateur Athletic Union, or AAU, basketball team. These club teams, especially in the summer and spring, would travel to tournaments, and the players would have the opportunity to be seen by college coaches. Unfortunately, Wyoming didn’t have any AAU teams and therefore, Johnson played on teams in Colorado and Montana to get exposure. Every summer, twice a week, Johnson’s mother would drive her about 3-4 hours for AAU practice. Looking back on it, Johnson recognizes “the huge sacrifice” that it was for her mother. Despite the sacrifice, the exposure worked and Johnson began receiving letters her freshman year in high school. But as soon as she got a letter from Stanford, she knew she wanted to attend. Once she was admitted, maybe a week went by before she committed. That was her junior year of high school.

However, Johnson didn’t always want to go to Stanford. Growing up, Kaylee had her sights on other schools. During her middle school years, Candace Parker was huge in the world of Women’s Basketball. Her dream at the time was to go play at the University of Tennessee under Pat Summit. “I imagine that’s pretty much everyone’s dream” Johnson said.

Committing to Stanford as a junior in high school, Johnson knew exactly what she was getting into, which is something that she believes student-athletes of today are losing sight of when they come into college sports. Or as she presents it, “you knew what you were getting into” (Johnson). This is in reference to the growing trend in the American public and media to call for the college sports industry to pay its student-athletes. This push comes from the sentiment that these athletes deserve portions of the money that they are bringing in for their colleges, with the average school bringing in over $29 million in revenue from their Men’s Division I Football program (Gaines). The University of Texas at Austin is the highest revenue producer, drawing $121 million in revenue from their football program. The other highest revenue producing sport is Men’s Basketball. According to Statista, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, March Madness, pulled in over $1.28 billion in revenue last year. (“TV Advertising Revenue during March Madness”). Though there is a lot of money being generated in the industry, Johnson believes that these athletes, herself included, are being paid with a college education.

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Kaylee Johnson

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Conclusion Even as the NCAA has evolved and the rules will continue to evolve, what makes a student-athlete has remained the same.

From Muir to Owen to Johnson, the one word that summarizes the student-athlete experience has remained the same: grind. Take Muir’s experience: during his holidays and breaks, as his classmates went back home to visit, he had to stay for basketball. Or as Johnson put it so eloquently, “Sometimes you’re on top of the world and sometimes it’s on top of you” (Johnson). In the cases of Muir and Owen, their experiences as student-athletes have prepared them for their current positions and taught them valuable life lessons such as discipline and resiliency. These same lessons and experiences are still present today as seen through Kaylee, who is pursuing a career in law. Protecting and developing the student-athlete experience is at the core of the NCAA’s structure. The organization and its members strive to create the best student-athlete experience possible. The student-athlete experience as seen through those I talked too is one that they will always cherish. As Owen puts it, “I found it didn’t get any better than that” (Owen).

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Athletes at the Stanford Invitational 33

Works Cited “Committees.” NCAA.org - The Official Site of the NCAA, www.ncaa.org/governance/committees. Accessed: 5 Mar. 2018.

“Division I Committee on Infractions.” NCAA.org - The Official Site of the NCAA, 23 Mar. 2018, www.ncaa.org/governance/ committees/division-i-committee-infractions. Accessed: 5 Mar. 2018.

“Enforcement Process: Penalties.” NCAA.org - The Official Site of the NCAA, 27 Nov. 2013, www.ncaa.org/enforcement/enforcementprocess-penalties. Accessed: 5 Mar. 2018.

Gaines, Cork. “The Average College Football Team Makes More Money than the next 25 College Sports Combined.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 20 Oct. 2016, www.businessinsider.com/college-sports-revenue-2016-10. Accessed: 5 Mar. 2018.

Johnson, Kaylee. Personal Interview. 10 April 2018.

Muir, Bernard. Personal Interview. 27 March 2018.

“NCAA College Football Games Division I FBS Attendance 2003-2016.” Statista, www.statista.com/statistics/254625/attendance-atdivision-i-fbs-college-football-games/. Accessed: 7 Mar. 2018.

“NCAA March Madness Tournament TV Revenue 1980-2013.” Statista, www.statista.com/statistics/287522/ncaa-basketballtournament-television-revenue/. Accessed: 7 Mar. 2018.

Nocera, Joseph, and Ben Strauss. Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA. Portfolio/Penguin, 2018.

Owen, Heather. Personal Interview. 13 March 2018.

“President Eliot on Football.” The School Journal, 18 Feb. 1905, books.google.com/books?id=Kf9KAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA188&hl=en #v=onepage&q&f=true. Accessed: 5 Mar. 2018.

“Report: FBI Probe into NCAA Corruption Identifies Possible Violations by Basketball Powers.” ESPN, ESPN Internet Ventures, 25 Feb. 2018, 34

www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/22553502/fbi-probe-corruption-reveals-basketball-powers-

broken-ncaa-rules. Accessed: 8 Mar. 2018.

Rhoden, William C. “The Vision of Walter Byers, a Flawed Leader, Still Shapes the N.C.A.A.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 30 May 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/sports/the-vision-of-walter-byers-a-flawed-leader-still-shapes-thencaa.html. Accessed: 5 Mar. 2018.

Robertson, Lorne. Personal Interview. 29 March 2018.

“Student-Athletes.” NCAA.org - The Official Site of the NCAA, www.ncaa.org/student-athletes. Accessed: 8 Mar. 2018.

“TV Advertising Revenue During March Madness 2017 | Statistic.” W, Mar. 2018, www.statista.com/statistics/219961/tv-advertisingrevenue-during-march-madness/. Accessed: 5 Mar. 2018.

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Adventures of Athletes: The NCAA Journey Born and raised in the Bay Area, Benjamin Shell is currently a junior at Freestyle Academy and Los Altos High School. From a young age, Ben has been into music as his Dad put him on to Classic Rock and the music of his time. As Ben got older, he fell in love with Hip-Hop upon discovering Kanye West by downloading (maybe illegally) his “Watch The Throne� album with Jay-Z. From love at first listen, Ben knew what he wanted to do with my life; become the next Kanye. He then proceeded to learn how to make his own beats and taught himself how to write songs, hell-bent on reaching his mountainous goal. About 5 years later, his philosophy still remains that if he puts the work in, his dream can be achieved. When Ben is not working on my music, he can be found working out at the gym, playing soccer, working at his job, watching movies with his family, and or hanging out with his homies.

Benjamin Shell