Miller Adds Voice to NCAA Transfer Legislation

Twitter: @JeffWhiteUVa | NCAA.com on Transfer Working Group

CHARLOTTESVILLE — In her 35 years at the University of Virginia, Jane Miller has served the athletics department in a variety of roles.

In nine seasons as head field hockey coach, she posted a 100-65-7 record. In 12 seasons as head women’s lacrosse coach, she went 145-44 and guided UVA to two NCAA titles.

After the 1995 season, Miller turned the lacrosse program over to one of her former players, Julie Myers, and moved into athletics administration at Virginia.  She’s been the Cavaliers’ senior associate athletics director for programs, as well as senior woman administrator, since 1991.

“It’s been a great ride,” Miller said recently in her McCue Center office.

She’s also been active in organizations outside the University, including the NCAA. From 2011-14, Miller was chair of the NCAA’s Division I championship/sports management cabinet. In late 2014, she became the first senior woman administrator appointed to the NCAA’s Division I Board of Directors, and her term runs until 2019.

Since the spring of 2017, Miller had another role in the NCAA. She’s the vice chair of the Division I Transfer Working Group, on which she and Navy’s Christine Copper are the NCAA Board of Directors’ representatives. South Dakota State’s athletics director, Justin Sell, is the group’s chair.

Miller is the only representative from an ACC school on the 19-member group, which has been in the news recently. It recommended legislation that the NCAA Division I Council approved on June 13. Starting this fall, student-athletes will be allowed to transfer without asking for permission from their current schools.

Also, once a student-athlete has notified his or her current school of transfer plans, the student-athlete’s name will be added to a database. Coaches from other schools may then contact the student-athlete without having to get permission from the current school.

“We’re really pleased,” Miller said. “We really think this is a win. This is a win for student-athletes. This is a win for the schools.”

On June 19, the Division I autonomy conferences approved another recommendation of the Transfer Working Group, this one a rule that allows a school to cancel the scholarship of a student-athlete at the end of a term after the student-athlete notifies the institution that he or she plans to transfer.

When the Transfer Working Group was formed, the NCAA’s Board of Directors asked it to follow several “guiding principles,” Miller said. “Some of those were: They wanted academics to be of the highest priority; they wanted the rules to be the least-restrictive for student-athletes; and they wanted consistent rules across the board unless data and research show that a sport might be different [from another sport].”

In early May, when the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics met in Washington, D.C., Miller was among the speakers. She addressed some of the proposed changes to NCAA transfer rules.

During her time on the Transfer Working Group, Miller said, “I’ve learned an awful lot, and I’ve heard an awful lot of opinions about what should or shouldn’t happen. I think the work has been good. The group is great. We want to have consensus. We want to have really good legislation.”

Miller, who’s from Easton, Mass., played three sports (basketball, field hockey and lacrosse) at Northeastern University in Boston. That experience helped her when she became a coach, and her coaching background has helped her as an administrator, she said.

However, Miller, “I would say that I’ve been away from coaching long enough that the world [of college sports] has changed dramatically. What coaches have to do nowadays compared with what I had to do as a coach is exponentially different. So I have empathy [for coaches] and I understand them, having sat in that seat, but I have a great appreciation for what they have to do now that I really didn’t have to do.”

The Transfer Working Group will meet again in August, Miller said, in Indianapolis. Among the topics the group will discuss are scholarship rules for graduate transfers and whether transfers in certain sports should be able to play immediately.

Under the current NCAA legislation, transfers in five sports — football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, baseball and hockey — must sit out a year before competing at their new schools.

In the other sports, it’s customary for the schools from which student-athletes  transfer to give them releases that make them immediately eligible for competition.

“The question is: Should all student-athletes be treated the same?” Miller said. “Why is a football player different than a field hockey player? If they’ve done everything academically they should do and they meet certain standards, why should they have to sit out a year?”

In previous discussions about that issue, Miller said, the Transfer Working Group could not reach a consensus. “We’ll talk about that some more [in August],” she said.

On the issue of graduate transfers, Miller said, the “big piece of that is to make the receiving school accountable for those transfers. And they’re not really transfers, because they’ve graduated. They’re using their [remaining] eligibility.”

Under one scenario, Miller said, the school to which a graduate student-athlete transfers would have to keep him or her on scholarship for the length of the graduate program.

“Even though they may only have one year of eligibility,” she said, “if it’s a two-year program, [the school pays] for that two-year program.”

Moreover, she said, the team would have to count that scholarship in the second year of the graduate program, even if the student-athlete is out of eligibility.

“Most coaches, obviously, are not in favor of all of that,” Miller said.

Currently, some graduate transfers enroll in two-year programs and then leave after one year, when their eligibility is exhausted, Miller said. That’s created a situation in which “they’re taking legitimate spots in graduate school programs from people who want to finish their degrees,” she said.

“It’s putting pressure on those admissions officers to take these athletes, and then they’re not finishing. And so there are some problems with that. So we’ll look at that whole space and see if we can come up with something. Again, we’ll try to build that consensus.”

Participating in the group, Miller said, has “been a lot of work, and it seems like every time I go to the ACC meetings, I’m on the agenda.”

Even so, she said, it’s been a positive experience for her.

“I feel like I learn so much by being a part of these groups,” Miller said. “I have to be a good listener, and I have to really consider everybody’s positions instead of going to my position right away based on my reasons. So I’ve seen that it’s really an educational piece for me.”