Conference commissioner talks about COVID, NIL issues, athletes as school employees

Julie Roe Lach’s first year as commissioner of the Horizon League coincided with one of the most consequential periods in the history of college athletics.

Universities endured enormous financial strains stemming from the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic. Student-athletes confronted mental health challenges. Two variants forced disruptions to practice and game schedules. And all of this turbulence was set against the backdrop of the dramatically changing face of college sports, which saw the dawn of the NIL era, the landmark Alston Supreme Court ruling, a dizzying summer of conference realignment and the ongoing re-imagining of the NCAA’s constitution. 

On3 caught up with Roe Lach, who had been the league’s deputy commissioner since 2014, to talk about her biggest takeaway from her first year as commissioner, concerns about federal intervention in college sports and issues with the transfer portal. Given her extensive experience working for more than 15 years at the NCAA, most recently as vice president of enforcement from 2010-13, Roe Lach is uniquely qualified to speak to the distinct challenges of policing new-age recruiting inducement schemes disguised as NIL deals.

This is part one of a wide-ranging interview, and it has been lightly edited for clarity and context.

Q: How much has COVID disrupted the winter sports season in the Horizon League?

ROE LACH: Candidly, probably more disrupted than we thought a few months ago. … With this Omicron onset in December, we’ve had a high number of cancellations. That’s probably the toughest part this year. Last year, there was no vaccination. This year, there is. Obviously, we’re encouraging that. So that has also influenced how we manage if a game is canceled. Should it be a forfeit? Or should it be a no-contest, which has a pretty significant impact on standings, and then of course your seed path and our championship? So I think the vaccination piece has added another layer. Last year, we were really just trying to play when we could. This year, there’s more of an expectation of competing as much as you can. And that’s really been our priority. So when we do have two teams that have lost opponents — they’re healthy but they don’t have an opponent — we’re actually pairing them up to play. That’s different than a lot of leagues. We really want to seize the opportunity, so to speak, when we’ve got healthy teams to allow them to play. And so far we’ve been able to do that. And it’s frankly working but not without some pain points.

Q: Congratulations on reaching the one-year mark as commissioner, a year unlike any other considering the challenges of a historic nature confronting college athletes at large. What was your biggest takeaway from year one?

ROE LACH: My biggest takeaway, just from how we lead and serve and keep providing these opportunities to our student-athletes, is that it sounds a bit cliché but we have to be flexible. The other piece is you have to start with the why: Why are we doing this? And for us, the “why” is to provide these competitive opportunities for our student-athletes. And so what we learned last year when we didn’t have them in the fall was that it was really tough from a mental health standpoint, because obviously being a Division I athlete is so important to their identity. You strip that away for a day, a week, a month, then that takes a real toll on our student-athletes, plus you put them in isolation or quarantine. There were just a lot of challenges. And I think we all realized we can make competition happen safely, that the spread [of the virus] is not happening on the basketball court or the soccer field; it’s happening in the social realms. So if we can make competition and provide that opportunity, that’s what we have to do. Our athletic directors are meeting weekly now. And we’re constantly looking at our competitive policies or safety policies and updating them as needed. We had a pretty tough call last week. And I just said, “Let’s just call timeout for a second, and go back to why we’re doing this. We’re not doing this for TV money, we’re not playing these games for the money. We’re not playing this because of extreme revenue from offering a home game. We’re working hard for these games because we’ve heard from your student-athletes and your coaches that it is the best thing for when we’ve got a healthy team to allow them to play.” So if that’s our starting point, what are your principles? Why are you doing this? And then you still have to be flexible. And I’ve talked to my staff a lot about that because our assumptions are changing. You make a decision that is really good last week based on three assumptions. Two of those, like CDC guidance, two of those are going to change in a week. So, historically, you have this desire to be consistent and fair, especially at a league office. And we’re still striving for that. But our assumptions are really changing at such a fast clip that it’s tough. … So I think what we’re realizing is I don’t know if you can get comfortable around it but get comfortable with managing the uncertainty.

Federal legislation on NIL?

Q: We could eventually see federal legislation related to NIL, or even beyond that. Do you have concerns about federal intervention changing the entire college athletics model as we know it?

ROE LACH: I do. And I don’t know that it’s imminent. But I think that it is certainly on the table and on the radar. I mean, we saw that with the influx of bills that were dropped last year, as some got more traction than others. You saw some themes, though, in those bills as related whether student-athletes should receive compensation beyond the scholarship and the academic support and nutritional support, mental health support. Should it just go more to a straight pay-for-play model. And now we’ve seen that with more moves — the guidance letter from the National Labor Relations Board. So there are certainly, if you’re reading the tea leaves, you’re starting to see some real traction for, “Do we need to go beyond the current scholarship model?” That’s revolutionary. If we change the financial model as really providing scholarships to student-athletes, and it goes beyond that, then where everybody’s mind goes to is that’s going to trigger employment status, which then most conversations go to collective bargaining or unions or just some level of a very different model than the current scholarship agreement offered to student-athletes.

Q: How dramatically different would the college sports landscape be if college athletes were granted employee status?

ROE LACH: It’s a different landscape because I think most people assume that if we moved to that model, whatever is bargained for would be in addition to what student-athletes currently receive from a scholarship standpoint. As I’ve talked with many, that’s not the case. Essentially what is offered to student-athletes would just drop down to Ground Zero. And then a scholarship, the academic support, the psychological support, the room and board, all of those really important benefits would be like part of that negotiation process. And now you have tax implications because you’re an employee. So there would be a lot of significant changes to the model, let alone just the administrative piece of you now would have representation on both sides. Most importantly, I think what would be lost in there, just a significant loss, is the academic nexus. And I can tell you in the Horizon League, we’ve got 12 member universities, 3,000-plus student-athletes, two-thirds of them had a 3.2 GPA or better last semester. We have true students who are also really good athletes, and spectacular athletes. And they know, the 90-plus percent of them, they might have professional aspirations but realistically they know they are going to have to get a degree to provide support outside of athletics. When you look at the revenue model of our schools, athletics are subsidized. Do athletics generate revenue? Yes. Do they generate enough revenue to cover the costs, most importantly, of the scholarship? No. So that, to me, causes concern when you look at the majority of Division I institutions because people think about the Power s, and even within the Power 5s, many are not running in the black. So it’s even a smaller segment that triggers this pay-for-play conversation. The impact though would be, I believe, really negative on the majority of Division I student-athletes because they probably would have less than they have now.

Q: What has surprised you most about the first six months of the NIL era?

ROE LACH: Well, the sky did not fall. I actually did not think it was going to fall, but I know there were some that were concerned. So that was not a surprise, but it’s worth noting. I was supportive of it from the get-go. And I am supportive of it because I don’t think that capitalizing on [NIL] compromises that relationship between sport and education. So I like the idea that we’ve moved away from just focusing on the amateur notion. To me, it’s not about amateurism; it’s about the collegiate model, which is that marriage between education and sport. That’s the scholastic model that’s unique to our country. NIL to me doesn’t threaten that. In fact, I think it creates more opportunities because now our student-athletes can go out and if they have the persona to capitalize on it, they can do it. And then [they can] learn how to be an entrepreneur, learn some of those great business, branding, financial literacy skills that are only going to help them once they graduate. I think it’s been a real positive. What I would like to see is more student-athletes being able to capitalize on their NIL. … What I’ve been working on with our members is, at the mid-major level, how can we just help our student-athletes learn what it means to build a brand? And then, is there a way for them to capitalize on it even locally, regionally, if not nationally, because I do think especially in our footprint of being in major metropolitan cities, we could figure out how to create some opportunities in a positive way and of course within the construct of the rules. The third piece of that is the financial literacy so that when they do make money, even if it’s a couple thousand dollars, they know how to manage that.