NIU coaches displayed understandable pleasure in the aftermath of last week’s NCAA cost-cutting convention, which turned into a mandate for the status-quo.

The NCAA President’s Commission had made motions earlier this year to cut down the number of scholarships allowed in basketball and football, the size of football coaching staffs and the length of a sport’s practice season, along with other penny-pinching proposals.

But NCAA coaches, meeting June 29-30 in Dallas, bonded together and struck down most of the proposals, including a move to drop football scholarships from 95 to 90. NIU football Coach Jerry Pettibone said he was “very pleased with the way things turned out.

“I think, either way, it would not have affected our program too much,” Pettibone said. “But I’m glad it stayed at 95, just as far as the quality of the game is concerned. I feel like everything’s fine the way it is now.”

The general consensus had been that smaller Division I schools like NIU would have profited from a scholarship reduction, with more blue-chip athletes being left alone by the powerhouses.

While Pettibone admitted it would have been nice to pick from a larger field, he said his program could have fared worse coming out of the convention.

“If it did get passed to 90, it would have helped a program like ours, but it certainly didn’t hurt us,” Pettibone said. “I was more concerned about the proposal to limit coaching staffs, and that did not pass.”

Pettibone said resolutions to limit the amount of spring practice time and the number of campus visits by high school prospects will not affect his program too much, since NIU already operated in the neighborhood of the new limitations.

While football avoided a possible scholarship reduction, basketball managed to recind an existing one. At the NCAA January convention, men’s and women’s basketball scholarships had been trimmed from 15 to 13.

The issue was bandied about last Tuesday and finally called to a vote, resulting in a restoration of the 15-scholarship limit. NIU assistant men’s basketball coach Jon Mackey said “we felt, as did most of the coaches around the country, that the reductions would be defeated.

“It (the restoration) helps because it establishes more depth, plus you have more bodies on the court for practices,” Mackey said. “But really, there wasn’t much that would affect us drastically. I believe there would have been a year to comply with a new limit, and we were going to lose four seniors anyway.

“If anything, it might have helped if we had been able to pick up a player or two that might have gone to a bigger school. So it might have helped us there, but otherwise we felt it would be defeated.”

Speaking for the NIU women’s basketball program, assistant Yvette Harris called the move “a definite plus. It gives us an opportunity to expand on our recruiting. It really will help us as far as our commitment to an athlete. We’ll be able to keep more players here longer, like if an athlete wants to go five years.”

NIU volleyball coach Herb Summers reserved judgment on how the convention resolutions will affect his program, saying he would wait until “the rule book comes out—which should be hot off the presses real soon.”

Summers said based on what he has heard and read thus far, a resolution limiting a team sport’s practice season to 26 weeks out of a nine-month semester should have “a negligible effect” on his program.

“It’s really not that big a deal,” said Summers, who added he had been following NCAA events while out recruiting. “I’ve been out recruiting the past couple of weeks, and especially last week—in talking to other college coaches—no one had heard exactly what was going on.”

Summers, who said he has been planning for any sweeping changes in his program’s structure, now says things should be pretty much the same as always come August, when his practice season begins.

The NCAA decided to limit the 26-week practice and playing season to team sports only. Olympic officials had expressed concern that gymnasts and other individual performers would be disadvantaged by cutting their practice time.