Daisha Simmons graduated from Alabama with an undergraduate degree in business. With a year of eligibility left, the Jersey City product wanted to come home to lend support to her struggling family, to be there for her ill older brother Chaz, who has end-stage renal disease and overworked mother Christine, battling health issues of her own.
Simmons was admitted into Seton Hall’s MBA program in sports management — a program Alabama doesn’t offer — and felt an apt way to cap her collegiate career would be to help the local program — the school her family lives 10 minutes away from — in what likely is her final season of organized basketball.
“It was a no-brainer,” she said in a phone interview.
Alabama, however, is standing in her way, allowed to stand in the way of this amateur athlete because of a nonsensical NCAA rule.
Since the talented guard — who averaged 13.8 points and 4.3 assists last year — already has transferred once, leaving Rutgers for the Crimson Tide following her freshman year, she was ineligible for the graduate transfer exception, which states a student-athlete is immediately eligible if the graduate program she enrolls in at her new school isn’t offered at her previous school.
Instead, she had to file for the graduate transfer waiver, which requires Alabama to release her and agree to allow her to play immediately.
The NCAA’s way of stepping in was to grant Simmons a sixth year of eligibility next year — at which point she will be 25. She may not be able to wait that long.
“It takes a toll on you,” she said. “I just want to be able to play.”
It’s just the latest example of how the NCAA and its archaic rules favor the schools and their coaches, rather than student-athletes. Making the schools money, apparently, isn’t enough.
Simmons hired an attorney, Don Jackson, on Wednesday who will exhaust all measures with the NCAA before filing a lawsuit.
Jackson said he spoke to Alabama assistant athletic director Shane Lyons on Wednesday, and Lyons told him Simmons didn’t provide him with proper documentation of her ill brother and mother. When Jackson asked if it would change anything if he delivered that documentation, Lyons said it wouldn’t.
Alabama’s reasoning? Simmons decided to leave too late in the process, leaving the school short. Yet, four other players were released from their scholarships, and Simmons said they were recruiting others players at the time she notified them of her final decision to leave.
Alabama is using her as an asset and because the NCAA allows the school to do so, it is merely following the rules.
Ironically, Jackson said, Alabama contacted him last May about former Kansas State player Leticia Romero, who went through a similar process when she wanted to leave after the coach who recruited her was fired. Oh, and Alabama’s backup quarterback, Florida State graduate transfer Jacob Coker, didn’t have to sit out at all because the Seminoles supported his transfer.
“They are using NCAA legislation to punish this young girl,” Jackson said. “The idea they didn’t have time to recruit a player is nonsense. They’re attempting to use this graduate transfer process as a way to retaliate against this lady for leaving.”
Sadly, this isn’t breaking new ground in the hypocritical world of college athletics.
Most scholarships can be tossed out the window on a yearly basis. Coaches switch addresses as they please, but players need approval to make a change.
Mergin Sina, Simmons’ high school coach at Gill St. Bernards, said he often speaks to college coaches with no free scholarships who talk about being able to push a player out to make room for someone they are recruiting.
Student-athletes — you know, the people who make money for these schools and their coaches — need approval to transfer and when given that approval its usually with a caveat — a list of schools they cannot attend. Why don’t coaches need a release to hop from one program to the other while players do?
“It’s unfair,” Simmons said. “It’s like they’re controlling us. We have to go through the whole process when we want to go to another school and when coaches do it, they have no problem and they’re making all this money. It’s the players out there playing, sweating, giving it their all.”
They’re being used. Yes, student-athletes receive a free education, but when their use is up, they are discarded. And we far too often get cases like these, a school holding up a kid who just wants to be back close to home, to be there for her struggling family.