Posted on 07/25/2006 10:19:23 AM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
Unless lawmakers remove the Confederate flag from the State House grounds, the road to the College World Series could become longer for Clemson, South Carolina and the state’s other schools.
An NCAA subcommittee is re-examining the flag issue after the head of the Black Coaches Association questioned why Clemson hosted regional and super regional games before advancing to Omaha this past season.
In 2002 the NCAA implemented a two-year moratorium prohibiting schools in South Carolina from hosting any pre-assigned championships. A year later the NCAA extended the ban indefinitely.
Now BCA executive director Floyd Keith wants college athletics’ chief governing body to consider broadening the ban to keep all postseason contests out of the state.
“At least from our viewpoint, there should not be any postseason events awarded,” Keith said Friday during a telephone interview.
Robert Vowels, commissioner of the Southwestern Athletic Conference and chair of the NCAA’s Minority Opportunities and Interests Committee, said an eight-person subcommittee plans a teleconference in the coming months to discuss the issue. The group wants to review the original moratorium and the selection process for championship sites in sports such as baseball and tennis, in which the highest-seeded schools often are chosen as hosts.
“The main thing is understanding the selection process and just seeing what’s what,” Vowels said. “Once we can understand processes, then we can go from there.”
The NCAA maintains the same postseason ban in Mississippi, which incorporates the Confederate flag into its state flag.
Greenville’s Bi-Lo Center hosted first- and second-round games of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament in 2002 because the bid had been awarded before the ban took effect.
Since then, however, South Carolina has lost out on several NCAA-sanctioned events.
• A cross-country regional that Furman had hosted for 21 years was moved.
• The ACC pulled its baseball tournament out of Fort Mill in 2003.
• Officials with USC and the Bi-Lo Center were turned down after submitting bids to serve as first- and second-round sites for the NCAA men’s basketball tourney.
“March Madness is March Sadness in South Carolina because there will be no March Madness here. And the NAACP is in lockstep with it,” said Lonnie Randolph, the NAACP state president.
Lawmakers have not addressed the flag issue since 2000, when a legislative compromise moved the flag from atop the Capitol dome to a Confederate monument on the north side of the State House grounds. Beginning in 1999, the NAACP asked African-Americans to boycott South Carolina’s tourism industry, an effort Randolph said would continue until the flag comes down.
In the meantime, the only postseason games that have been staged in the state have been at the conference level. While aware of the NCAA’s moratorium, the SEC allows its schools from South Carolina and Mississippi to submit proposals to host the conference’s neutral-site championships.
The SEC held its 2005 women’s basketball tournament in Greenville after a scheduling conflict at Atlanta’s Philips Arena forced organizers to look for an alternative site. This past fall the SEC cross country championships were run at Fort Jackson.
However, despite attractive arenas in Greenville and Columbia, event organizers across the state have had their hands tied when it comes to trying to host games in the lucrative NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
Said Randolph: “(Basketball fans) don’t drop pennies in your community. They drop millions of dollars in your community.”
Vowels said his subcommittee would study the issue of extending the NCAA’s ban to include all postseason events and would make a recommendation to the NCAA’s executive committee by the end of the year.
Even if no changes are made, Keith, the BCA director, believes the ban has been effective in drawing attention to the flag.
“It’s certainly an issue of awareness that has been supported and embraced by the NCAA. That in itself is a positive step from our platform,” Keith said. “Is it completely eradicated or something we can say it’s done? No. The issue is still there.”
It sounds kinda like a law firm. "Good afternoon. Lunatics, Weirdos, Fools & At Least One Outright Bigot. How may I direct your call?"
It that a pickup line?
I wouldn't know, I'm not gay, but you seem to be hoping it is.
Have a nice day.
That slavery must be abolished as a federal, rather than a state, law.
And that mandate was stated where?
pity that you don''t know that.
free dixie,sw
despite your views (99% of which i disagree with) at least you aren't a DUMB-bunny!
free dixie,sw
You asked me first...
I would tend to believe you were trolling for a gay love connection with a dixie boy.
Pity! I know someone that would be just your type, why if you softly whistled dixie in his ear, he'd let you be Sherman to his Atlanta. Just don't say anything about indians.
Ouch! That's gotta hurt...
Yes, everything would have been just wonderful if those noble rebs had won. Losers can always say how great things would be had they just won. John Kerry would have made a great president and the slaveowners of the Confederacy would have suddenly become paragons of limited government (for anybody but themselves). I would suggest a study of athe few years the CSA actually did exist to see what a heavy-handed regime they actually were.
I wish that the South would have won!
It wouldn't have mattered in the long run. The North would have beaten them even worse in the inevitable rematch. Under a few decades of Confederate rule the backward South would have lost even more ground to the modernizing North. And the second time, the USA wouldn't have shown the slaveowning elite the misguided leniency that actually characterized Reconstruction.
You couldn't expect a fair fight from a from a class of people unable to do their own work without help of people they "owned".
That's why I never tire of reading about the way Sherman's March brought reality back to a class of people whose selfishness led the nation into misery.
What has that to do with Confederacy? The South and the Confederacy are not the same things.
I'm a southerner. Unless you were a slaveowner, the Confederacy was bad. The best thing for the people of the South was when the CSA lost. The desertion rates toward the end of the war show that the people of Dixie were finally begining to realize the revolution of the politicians was not worth their blood.
The Union soldiers were really great fighters in that they could do all that and still have time to thoroughly rout our brave lads in tattered gray.
I asked because you exhibit qualities us hetero men commonly refer to as faggity!
Don't bother me any more, fag.
So what you are saying is that your Gaydar peaked an interest in me?
free dixie,sw
I'm sure you'll look very sexy wearing a confederate flag bikini.
Tell me since it is considered disrespectful to convert a flag into clothing, would you be disrespecting the Confederate flag by wearing it as a mankini....
It is considered disrespectful to convert a US flag to clothing, but the bikini shown (like those typically worn as US flag bikinis) is merely a representation of the confederate flag, not an actual flag converted. good try.
BTW, I'd bet i had more ribbons & medals on exiting the service than you, if you ever really served.
If you did serve, thank you very much, btw.
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