#1 Ranked NAIA Heptathlete Denied Ability to Compete at Nationals Over Email Error

Can't blame the NAIA here. This is pretty clearly the coach's fault.

The Starved Elephant wrote:

Can't blame the NAIA here. This is pretty clearly the coach's fault.

I 100% disagree. You have to get an email and then respond to it?

Yes the coach who may have already mailed it in as he's resigning screwed up but why can't they have some common sense.

If I'm driving 56 in a 55, the cop doesn't have to give me a ticket.

rojo wrote:

The Starved Elephant wrote:

Can't blame the NAIA here. This is pretty clearly the coach's fault.

I 100% disagree. You have to get an email and then respond to it?

Yes the coach who may have already mailed it in as he's resigning screwed up but why can't they have some common sense.

If I'm driving 56 in a 55, the cop doesn't have to give me a ticket.

Every single division requires the coaches to declare their athletes to compete. You are not automatically entered in the events you qualified in. It is the coach's responsibility to make sure he/she declared the athletes. They all do it and would go to the ends of the earth to find the email that they need to do that. Except this guy, apparently.

Now, I have heard that officials will sometimes call coaches that unexpectedly didn't declare an athlete to ask if it was a mistake. It would have been appropriate to do that here. It's also kind of unfair that they can't make an exception for this obvious mistake. I suppose blame can be put on both parties.

What I struggle to understand, however, is why the athlete and media is put all of the blame on the NAIA. If this happened to me, I would be absolutely livid with my coach.

I wonder if there's more to the story. Maybe the NAIA inquire to this coach, but he was so indifferent that he just ignored everything.

rojo wrote:

The Starved Elephant wrote:

Can't blame the NAIA here. This is pretty clearly the coach's fault.

I 100% disagree. You have to get an email and then respond to it?

Yes the coach who may have already mailed it in as he's resigning screwed up but why can't they have some common sense.

If I'm driving 56 in a 55, the cop doesn't have to give me a ticket.

The coach really has no leg to stand on. The NAIA manual --

-- has a detailed procedure for entering and declaring for the Championships. Page 9 of that manual lists the declaration period for multi-events.

Either he didn't ever read the manual, or he willfully ignored it.

It's not so much that he ignored it, but the school's spam filter screwed things...

The facts:

- There is a four hour window to declare for the dec/hep/marathon. All other events have a 48 hour window.

- The e-mail was mid-identified by the school's spam filter as spam. From the article:

DWU adopted a new email spam filter in April and the NAIA registration link was sent to Lurz’s spam folder, according to DWU President Amy Novak. Employees are given notice by the filter about potential spam four hours after the email arrives and they are responsible for confirming those emails as spam.

So when the e-mail was sent to the coach identifying the registration e-mail as spam, the window had closed. I'd be interested to know if the e-mail is quarantined for four hours before the "potential spam" e-mail is sent or if it is in the spam folder the entire time. At my office we receive one e-mail every day listing all potential spam, and it never appears in our spam folder in Outlook.

So the coach bears responsibility, but so does the school. The school tried to appeal saying that it wasn't a student or coach but rather an institutional issue, but was shot down.

I understand the NAIA stonewalling (the line has to be drawn somewhere), but who is being punished for the coach's/school's error? Also, why such a short window for these events when compared to the rest of the events?

They changed their minds.

https://www.keloland.com/sports/naia-changes-ruling-to-allow-dwu-athlete-to-compete-for-national-title/2016652150

I don't want to comment on the spam filter vs coach's error issue, but having a window that's only 4 hours long for declarations for a national championship seems INSANE to me. That's just not enough time, what if the coach got in a car accident earlier in the day or had a kid get sick. You would need to designate at least 2 people to just be sitting around waiting for the window to open.