Our Blog and NCAA Compliance

I mentioned during my first post that all of us blogging on this site are both Harvard students, and student journalists working for a licensed and independent (read, not Harvard owned or operated) radio station. Now sometimes this isn't made clear, because the name of the station is Harvard Radio Broadcasting, and it is run by Harvard students, but we are licensed to use the Harvard name from the University, and that is our sole connection.

The reason I'm mentioning this all again is because of this Washington Post article (h/t to the Cornell Basketball Blog) which discusses the challenges of NCAA compliance when it comes to fans with media credentials.

So I decided we needed to do some disclosure. We are, as Harvard students, of course fans of Harvard athletics. We are friends with Harvard athletes at school and we hope they have the biggest success possible. We want them to win Ivy League, ECAC, and national championships.

But we are also credentialed members of the media, giving us greater access than the normal fan when it comes to different sporting-related events. We take this as a serious responsibility, and as such, we just want to make it clear that we have not, do not, and will not engage in the types of activities described in the Post article.

Our goal is to be a comprehensive source for news for Harvard sports in particular, and the Ivy League, and ECAC hockey in general, which means reporting scores, publishing news on current players, and interview current players and staff. It may also mean us discussing recruits here on the blog (or it may not- for both NCAA and professional reasons, we have kept all discussion of potential recruits off of the airwaves and we may decide to make that a blog-wide policy as well). But we will never contact any Harvard recruits, or respond to such contact- that's a job for the Crimson athletic dept. and the respective coaches. Otherwise we break the first rule of journalism- we would be the story, we wouldn't be reporting it.

Keeping all that in mind, I just figured we might as well discuss this so we can firmly say that we are and have always been fully NCAA Compliant, and that we have never communicated with a potential Harvard athlete, nor do we see it as our job to persuade people to don the crimson, black, and white in their athletic careers.