Southern Baseball ineligible; awaits further infractions

The Southern University baseball team will be facing their third season of not being able to compete in the NCAA tournament due to multiple sanctions of the department.
The first two penalties were due and in part to the athletic department-wide which trickled down because Southern sent unusable data to the NCAA with the student-athletes Academic Progress Rates.
Legendary Southern head coach, Roger Cador revealed the sanction even though the school awaits for the written penalties from the NCAA.
The reason the baseball program is under the latest infraction is because they fell short of the minimum of 930 score for Academic Progress Rates for a four year period.
The team was revealed of the sanctions this past Saturday.
“I didn’t want to go into the season living a lie,” said Cador, “We’ll just wait for other sanctions that certainly will be coming.”
The other sanctions that the department is under is for the “over-rewarding scholarships”, Interim Athletic Director, Roman Banks revealed.
Banks goes in to explain about the program, “That’s a sport that had some other problems not just APR but other things they’re going to have to deal with. They weren’t using the proper formula when it comes to the NCAA.”
A brief example would be that out of state fees are supposed to count as scholarship money awarded even though they are successfully waived for out of state students. The baseball program, however, wasn’t deducting the out of state fees from its pool of scholarship money.
As a head coach of the basketball team himself, Banks said, “This caused them to go over in scholarship money.”
Banks continued to speak on the responsibility of coaches, “All head coaches are supposed to have a reasonable knowledge of their program. You can make a mistake but after you do it year after year, it becomes a programs problem and the institutions problem for not catching it.”
Banks said that the overdue of scholarship funds dates back seven to eight years.
“We have the infractions counted up, then we know we’ll be in for the long run,” said Banks.
Banks will expect the written infractions to be sent to the university in three weeks. After that, the university will have the opportunity to respond and self-impose additional sanctions for NCAA consideration. The process could take six to twelve months.
Banks revealed that the first issue with scholarships was discovered in 2013 when they investigated the academic the unusable data placed on athletics.
Cador said that his assistant, coach Dan Canevari analyzed the records and discovered that they had a “cancer situation”.
To remove such a tumor, Cador said, “We realized we had some things to fix. Once we found out what they were, we took the necessary steps to correct them. We purged the roster to get in compliance with what the NCAA is looking for.”
In perilous efforts to get the team in academic standing, Cador dismissed several players with remaining eligibility and brought in 22 newcomers with an added emphasis in academics.
“We made some modifications last year,” said Cador, “The things we did to the roster were in anticipation of this situation coming down. We had to do something to prepare for the future. That’s what we did.”
It’s very unclear if Southern will be able to place into the Southwestern Athletic Conference, in which the winner of such advances into the NCAA tournament.
Last season, Southern went to the SWAC tournament, advanced to the finals and scaled toe to toe with Texas Southern in which they lost 10-0.
The future awaits for the baseball program but it cannot be fully positive results.