The University of Mississippi Athletics
STAFF BLOG: Johnson On Recruiting Challenges
12/1/2009 | Athletics
The Ole Miss athletics department's senior administrators and leadership publish blogs on OleMissSports.com to offer fans added insight into the overall operation of the department. Lynnette Johnson is in her 21st year at Ole Miss and serves as the Executive Associate Athletics Director/Senior Women's Administrator.
December 1, 2009
Athletics has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My parents are amazed that I have been able to make a career out of my love of athletics. It is really good for me because each summer that I was not holding down a summer job to help pay for college, I was working on my game. I told them I would earn a scholarship to college. I am sure that my story about working toward an athletics scholarship to compete in a sport I loved and to have an opportunity to receive a college degree is not unlike many current and future Ole Miss Rebel student-athletes.
The combination of the student-athlete working on their game and their academics to earn a scholarship to college and the institution's recruiting process is the key to building a great program. Billy Chadwick and the men's tennis program prove that year after year. The entire recruiting process of identifying, evaluating, communicating and leading up to the scholarship offer can be years in the making. Coaching staffs spend countless hours watching film, riding the roads and bringing prospective student-athletes onto our campus. They never know what will be the factor that defines a prospect's decision to accept the scholarship offer. It can be the coaching staff, facilities, amount of aid offered, possibility of immediate playing time, atmosphere on campus, team dynamics, degree program offered or opportunity to win championships and compete in postseason play.
The NCAA has scholarships divided into two categories: Equivalency and Head-count. Equivalency allows you to divide the scholarships up by percentage. You can offer one prospect 50 percent and another 35 percent. The total amount of aid each year must add up to the total number of scholarships allowed, for example 11.7 or 14, scholarships, so each year a coach has only so much aid to work with depending on how many athletes graduate. Head-count sports are all full scholarships. Each prospect is offered the full amount of in-state or out-of-state cost to attend the institution.
We have 18 programs at Ole Miss. Equivalency sports are: baseball, men's tennis, softball, soccer, men's and women's golf, men's and women's track and field, and rifle. Baseball has a NCAA rule on scholarship amounts and squad size. If a baseball prospect is offered aid, it must be a minimum of 25 percent and they can have no more than 35 student-athletes on the squad. This adds another element for baseball recruiting and scholarship offers. Football, men's and women's basketball, women's tennis and volleyball are head-count sports.
If you think about how many NCAA Division IA, II and III schools that offer athletics programs, imagine the recruiting competition each institution, sports program and coaching staff have to do to bring in quality student-athletes each year. On the other side, student-athletes that are NCAA DI level talent have lots of options as well, and the entire recruiting process can be an overwhelming for all involved.
We just finished up the November early signing period and you have read about all the top notch student-athletes that our women's basketball, baseball, softball, track, rifle and soccer programs signed. It took a lot of time and effort on the student-athlete to work to get to this level, and our coaching staffs worked hours, days, months and sometimes years to recruit these young people to join our Ole Miss family.
June 12, 2009
It has definitely been a fun year. Our programs have done a lot of winning during the 2008-09 season, and our student-athletes and coaches have won a lot of awards on and off the fields/courts. Our teams won two SEC regular season championships and an SEC tournament title. We advanced 11 of our teams to postseason play, highlighted by a Cotton Bowl victory, a NCAA final eight run by men's tennis and our fourth baseball Super Regional appearance.
Student-athlete individual awards also headlined the year: Devin Britton won the first NCAA singles national title in our men's tennis history; Peria Jerry and Michael Oher placed two Rebels in the first round of the NFL draft and Bram ten Berge won the prestigious SEC H. Boyd McWhorter Scholar Athlete of the Year Award. We also had several SEC individual track champions, with LaJada Baldwin, Juliana Smith and Wale Odetunde, and a ton of All-American and All-SEC athletes, whether first or second team honorees.
Finally, I would like to thank all our fans. You don't realize that we can't accomplish all the success without you. Student-athletes need support while they compete. You create a huge home field advantage with all the cheering at each and every competition. We led the nation in men's tennis attendance and our team advanced to the final eight. We had the best attendance of any NCAA baseball regional and super regional. Putting the NCAA men's tennis regional host aside, we are awarded NCAA host sites in my opinion on two major reasons. First is the success of our teams, and then our atmosphere which comes from our athletics staff's ability to run the event and our fans!
December 8, 2008
The Holiday Season is here and we hope that you all have your Cotton Bowl travel plans set. Coach Nutt, his staff and the student-athletes have worked very hard this season. The reward for that effort for all (team, staff and fans) is a trip to Dallas.
During this past year and a half, the University and the Athletics Department have been undergoing the NCAA re-certification process. In the late 80s and early 90s, the NCAA was looking for a process to define standards that all NCAA institutions would be evaluated on over a period of time. Former Ole Miss Chancellor Gerald Turner volunteered Ole Miss to go through the pilot certification process in 1991. The NCAA then officially adopted the certification cycle every 10 years for all NCAA level institutions. The NCAA's purpose for the Athletics Certification process is three-fold: 1) it opens the affairs of athletics to the university community and the public; 2) it sets standards for the operation of a Division I athletics program; and 3) it puts tough sanctions in place for institutions that fail to conduct a comprehensive self-study or to correct problems.
The certification process is a long and detailed event that has the University assigned multiple committees of faculty, staff, alumni, students and administrators to audit the Athletics Department on the operating principles set forth by the NCAA committee. The topics were Governance and Compliance, Academic Integrity and Student-Athlete Equity and Well-Being. Each committee had a set of "operating principles" that it had to research and answer for the NCAA committee.
We submitted our written report to the NCAA on May 1, and we have just completed our on-campus peer review. We are now in the process of finalizing our response to the peer review report that is due to the NCAA on December 19. The entire process has been long, organized and detailed but overwhelmingly positive.
As a senior administrator, it has been my responsibility for the past 10 years and moving forward to oversee this process. I am proud to say the Athletics Department and University did a phenomenal job during the last 10 years on conducting our plan and following the NCAA principles, and we are receiving very positive feedback along the way to hopefully a "full certification status" that will be announced sometime in March 2009.
June 6, 2008
The commitment to host NCAA championships is a priority for the university and the athletics department. Our student-athletes, coaches and administrators know the best opportunity to be successful in postseason play is to play at home. The men's tennis team is our best example of that. We have hosted eight regional tournaments, and our team has advanced to seven sweet sixteens.
The NCAA has hosting parameters for each sport that can host on campus sites. Over the past 10 years, it has been my role to organize the NCAA bid process for all of our sports that could have the opportunity to host. The organization to manage these events starts early in the summer before the next athletics season starts.
We could not host at this level without the support from the City of Oxford. Each year the first item of business is to secure all the hotel rooms that are required to host each event for which we would like to bid. It is a requirement to let the NCAA know that rooms are secured and available for the teams that are placed in our regional. We will secure rooms for all regionals that we feel our programs will have a chance to be successful in and we can fulfill all of the NCAA championship parameters. Over the past several years, we have prepared to place bids for soccer, softball, men's tennis and baseball. NCAA regionals are not guaranteed; your ability to host, first and foremost, is secured by the overall success of that athletics program. We have seen that in our very successful baseball and men's tennis programs.
The next phase of hosting is preparing the NCAA bids based on the parameters. The NCAA asks that each school fill out the following items:- -Facility evaluation: This form asks for all the details and requirements of the venue. It will ask for seating capacity, attendance numbers, media, TV capabilities, number of courts, field and court measurements, scoreboard functions, parking, locker rooms and meeting rooms, to just name a few of the questions.
- -Key contact information: This form requires all the tournament management information to include phone numbers, e-mail addresses and mailing addresses on all vital services for the tournament, such as food and apparel concessions, video, media, sports medicine, facility management and tournament directors' information.
- -Financial bid: This form is the detailed revenue and expense of running each regional that is bid. Each tournament has a required minimum bid. The form submitted will have the amount of ticket revenue that we feel will be sold for each regional, plus our details of the expense of hosting that event on our campus.The expenses include: security, field preparation, clean-up, marketing, live streaming, banquet, media food, telephone lines, etc.
- -Auxiliary items: Each bid will ask for a stadium map, directions, possible lighting survey for TV capabilities, seating map for visiting teams, etc.
Once all the required items are submitted to the NCAA, we wait. Each NCAA championship has their team announcement, and usually at that time, we find out if we are chosen to host. It is an exciting time around Oxford and campus when we get the opportunity to host an NCAA regional championship. We take a lot of pride in hosting this type of event and look forward to our many opportunities again next year.
December 20, 2007
It is a great time to be a part of Ole Miss Athletics, and it is a privilege to work on a day-to-day basis with our athletics programs. To be designated a Division IA intercollegiate athletics program by the NCAA, a university must have a minimum of 14 sports. Ole Miss has 18 intercollegiate programs, and as Senior Associate Athletic Director/Senior Women's Administrator, it is my role as a sport administrator to work with 15 of our programs and their head coaches on daily operations issues, such as budget, compliance, facilities, gender equity and various other internal operations including SEC, NCAA and University meetings. The women's programs I work with are basketball, volleyball, tennis, indoor and outdoor track and field, cross country, golf, soccer, softball and rifle. The men's programs are indoor and outdoor track and field, golf, cross country and tennis.
We have fantastic head coaches and student-athletes with each of these programs. The effort and commitment that they make to their programs is shown in the adjectives used to describe them: Western Division Champions, SEC Champions, NCAA Individual Champions, NCAA participants, All-SEC, Sweet Sixteen Participants, Elite Eight participants, Academic and Athletic All-Americans, Taylor Medalist, Honor Society, and SEC Coach of the Year.
The student-athletes and coaches put so much hard work and time into their sports. Most fans don't see the behind the scenes effort of our coaches and athletes during their practice, film, travel and recruiting time. The NCAA rules allow student-athletes to practice and train in the off-season up to eight hours per week and in-season up to 20 hours per week with one day off. Student-athletes are filling up their entire days between class, practice and study time, sometimes hoping to just get lunch. They have to prepare to travel during their competition season by communicating with their professors and being ahead of their game in class work. Travel time does not count in the 20-hour rule, and as you know, loading up a bus to drive to an event or getting to the airport in plenty of time to catch a flight can be very time-consuming and our programs are representing Ole Miss all over the country. Last year alone, our teams competed in 27 states and the Bahamas. It is a great opportunity for our Alumni all over the country to watch our teams compete and represent our University.
As we move into our spring sport season, I invite you out to experience all of our Ole Miss athletics programs.
