The NCAA may decide Sunday he will never be eligible to play basketball.
By BRIAN LANDMAN
Published January 9, 2004
Unless the NCAA Division I Management Council decides Sunday to reassess when a recent amateurism rule change should have been implemented, Florida State junior forward Diego Romero might never be eligible.
The council is taking up that issue, giving Romero another, perhaps final, shot at a collegiate career.
"Sometimes there are misunderstandings or miscommunications between what a large governing body recommends and how the actual ruling is put into effect," ACC associate commissioner Bernadette McGlade, one of 51 management council representatives, said before leaving for the NCAA convention in Nashville.
"If there hasn't been any misunderstanding, then we're going to be exactly where we are. But if we aren't, this body has the right, it has the obligation, to correct their intentions."
For student-athletes entering a NCAA school beginning this academic year, the NCAA said that if they had signed a contract or played professionally - as Romero did as a teenager in Argentina - they were permanently ineligible.
Had Romero come to FSU a year earlier, he would have faced a different policy and, like many other eligible international basketball players, likely would have been reinstated after serving an eight-game suspension.
"I do everything everybody told me I have to do," a teary-eyed Romero said in his first public statements since coming to FSU and finding himself in the midst of controversy. "I just think this is no fair for me."
FSU argued that Romero was in the system - in his second year of junior college - when the NCAA made the change in late October 2002 and should be "grandfathered in," and treated under the old rule.
NCAA vice president David Berst said during a teleconference that not all rule changes have included a grandfather clause and denied FSU's claim that transfers weren't discussed but conceded many council members might not recall it.
That's reason enough for Sunday's discussion.
"I've been very careful about what I've said about Diego because I've been extremely discouraged," coach Leonard Hamilton said. "I'm here just waiting for something to materialize that can be fair and equitable. I'm at a loss. I've never been involved in anything that has affected me as much."
If the council acts in Romero's favor, the matter would be sent back to the student-athlete reinstatement committee, which denied Romero's appeal in November, this time applying the old standard. FSU officials said they have supplied everything to the NCAA, hundreds of pages, and would expect an "immediate" response.
