Partial transcript from teleconferece with Greenspan, Sampson and Calhoun
Athletic Director Rick Greenspan
In July during a routine Indiana internal records review it was determined that some impermissible calls occurred. We immediately contacted campus legal counsel, President McRobbie and athletic director representatives. Throughout this investigation that began in July we were seeking to determine what occurred and a full understanding of such. We were pleased throughout the investigation with the cooperation of the coaching staff and we asked Ice Miller for an objective opinion on the facts and they did not indicate in any way that the coaches were not cooperative. We concurred, we moved forward and we have instituted sanctions on our program. Some of these sanctions are outlined in our release.
(inaudible)…We take the self imposed sanctions very seriously and are intended to send a strong message of institutional control at Indiana. I hope that all of you appreciate the fact the final say on appropriate actions and the timetable on these actions is to be determined by the NCAA and we are awaiting guidance from them.
Indiana basketball head coach Kelvin Sampson
I am the leader of this program. The responsibility lies with me as far as NCAA rules. We have had some issues as far as being 100% compliant on the telephone rule. I agree with Rick Greenspan about the penalties. Our goal is to be 100% compliant. We did a good job in almost every area except the telephone rule. As we move forward, we are dedicating to doing this thing the right way, to be 100% compliant as go on and we look forward to that.
On whether he wondered if the three-way calls from Senderoff were allowed under the sanctions when he received them:
Sampson: As far as the three-way calls, they were all kids calling me. My assistant coaches did a great job of telling the kids that I couldn¹t call them and seeing if they would call me. I found out about the three-way calls after they looked at the records and saw there were three-way calls made. After the kid had tried to call me and could not reach me on my cell phone because cell phone service or whatever, they would call coach Senderoff and tell him that Coach Sampson is not available on his phone. Coach would then patch these kids into me. So when they made the connection and I answered the phone, the kids started talking, so he was basically like an operator. He stayed on the line because if he hung up, we would lose the connection. This was ten calls out of thousands and it is disappointing. We are trying to get to 100 percent compliance, so if we had ten out of a thousand, that was ten too many.
Associate AD Grace Calhoun: I do want to point out that three-way calling is permissible by NCAA rules but were not permissible by the sanctions. Most of the problems that we are dealing with in our recent report to the NCAA are in regards to the sanctions and not NCAA violations.
Sampson: It’s disappointing. We have been dealing with these sanctions from May 25 to May 25. When it was over, we were under the impression that the thing was over. And we were confident that we had followed all the rules. I want to go back to the three-way calls for a minute. Other than one call, I was not aware that it was a three-way call. We are disappointed. We are dedicated to 100 percent compliance. We had an issue with the phone calls and we have some things worked out. This is something that we can be 100 percent compliant, not 99 percent or 99.5 percent, we can 100 percent compliant with this as we move forward.
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