While much of the focus among college sports fans has centered around the ways athletes are preparing physically during the coronavirus shutdown, perhaps an even more important issue is how they're coping academically.
Not only are all Florida State University classes for the spring semester being completed online, but the FSU office of Student Athlete Academic Services is being required to provide its support from a distance as well. That means the Seminoles' players in various sports do not have access to the in-person tutors and academic specialists that they do under normal circumstances.
In the third part of our series on FSU's athletic support services, we spoke with Dr. Kacy King, the Seminoles' associate athletics director for academics, about the challenges her office has faced and how they're continuing to provide assistance so that the school's student-athletes don't fall behind.
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Q: While your department's work takes place behind the scenes, it obviously plays an integral role in the process of helping student-athletes manage all of the demands on them between school and practices and games. And that usually means a lot of in-person communication. Could you just start off by describing how things have changed for you and your staff over the past weeks? And have you been able to settle into a routine yet?
A: It certainly has been an adjustment, as you can imagine. We do a lot of face-to-face work with our students. And our students are used to being able to come in and access the center and have the ability to find a tutor or whatever it is that they need to be able to support them academically. So it has certainly been an adjustment. I do think that we are settling into a routine, which is good. But each day brings a situation where we have to evaluate the way things are working and discuss if we need to adjust, because it is not a one-size-fits-all mentality at all. And that’s the way we always try to address academics as part of the Florida State experience for our student-athletes. We really try to focus on an individual basis of what students need, so that hasn’t changed. That’s actually just continuing.
I think one of the biggest challenges for our staff is we already work a lot of hours, just like everyone does in athletics. But now that you’re at home – and your home is serving as your office -- one thing our staff has expressed is that it’s really challenging to not have an off-button.When things are normal, you can escape from the office for an hour and go do a workout or something before you come back and have nighttime hours with a student. You’re able to disconnect. But that’s not exactly the same picture right now. And students, they need help at all hours of the day, and that’s a real thing. So we’re figuring out how to set those boundaries in a new way, but also making sure that we’re helping those students, because that’s most important.
Q: You have a professional staff in place, but you also rely on a lot of students to do tutoring with the athletes, right?
A: Absolutely.
Q: So how is that working in this environment?
A: When we first learned that the two weeks [of classes in late March] were going online, we went ahead and reached out to all of our tutors and mentors and said, “If there’s anyone that wants to self-select out and say, ‘You know what? I’m not going to be able to make this work. I need to really focus on me or my family or whatever.’ Then let’s start with that.”
Because we have about 70 hourly workers who this would impact also. And there were a handful who were like, “You know, I do need to focus on my family right now. I can’t do this.” And we made it clear that this won’t affect how we view you or anything. We wanted to make sure we gave them that space to check out if they needed to. But a majority of them have said, “I’m good. What do you need me to do?” And they’ve been awesome. So basically in four days, our tutor coordinator and our assistant tutor coordinator moved every single tutoring appointment to an online environment.
And we are mimicking the way the university does it too, because they had to move their tutoring online also. So we’ve been really communicating a lot with Courtney Barry, who runs the online campus tutoring area, to make sure we’re following the same plan. And we have a staff member who either watches the entire tutoring session or is in the whole tutoring session to make sure that our academic integrity is upheld. And we also have a policy that our athletes do not have contact information for our tutors. It just keeps things clean from an NCAA perspective. So we had to really work through how do you use Zoom and all of this stuff if you don’t have contact info?
But our staff has been tremendous, and they’re using generic emails to contact all of the student-athletes and then all of the tutors separately — to uphold the way we like to have that separation. It means a lot of work, but we’ve got to make sure we do it ethically and that the students are still supported in the ways they need to be.
Q: I know an issue we hear a lot about from our own kids’ schools is concerns about whether students have access at home to computers and being online. Has that been an issue for you guys and how can you resolve that?
A: I actually worked with the university task force on this — from a more universal perspective of making sure that all of our students are supported. For right now, it seems that we are fortunate in that many of our students have access to Internet providers. I don’t think it’s 100 percent, but I don’t have an accurate count of who has challenges. A lot of the apartment complexes in Tallahassee, if they decided to stay here, have Internet as part of their leasing agreements. And the university is also loaning laptops to students if they don’t have one — there’s a process through case management you can go through. And in athletics, we already have a laptop loaning program that we set up a few years ago.
So right now, we are mimicking the way the university is lending their laptops. And before spring break, we were already thinking about, “We need to get these laptops to the people we know are going to end up needing them — for what was going to be two weeks at that time.” So we did a call-out to the entire athlete population making them aware, and we had a couple who said they would need it. We’ve only had one student who has reached out to us after spring break who said they had a problem. So we sent a laptop to him, because that’s something the university is doing too. And we don’t want to take away from the university’s allotment when we already have a program in place for that.
Q: Without getting into specifics, I’m sure some student-athletes already needed more help than others. What are you able to do to help those who might be more at-risk of falling behind or who have learning challenges?
A: Right now, it doesn’t matter if you were a high-achieving student or you were a student who has lived on the edge ... you need a lot of support. The students need us right now, and we need to make sure that they know how to do certain things. One of the things they’ve switched from a university standpoint is how students take exams in certain classes. You can be a great student but be confused on how that’s working, so you need to walk through those steps with someone.
Like with Honorlock (an online proctoring system), you’ve got to have a secure room where you’re not going to have a little brother walk in and then your test is gonna have a problem. So we’ve been working on that from a global standpoint and talking through those things. And, of course, we have students that we know we have to keep a very watchful eye on. And we want to make sure that they’re doing well.
The university has also made the decision to allow some classes to be pass-fail, so we have just been reminding students to talk to the academic staff before changing a class to pass-fail so that we don’t have any eligibility issues that are unintended consequences. Because we already watch our students very closely and have a good idea of what students need, as far as the NCAA [requirements], but also if they’re trying to get into a certain major. I think we have been in pretty good shape there.
One of the bigger challenges we've had is if you had a learning specialist who was supposed to be meeting with one student, you might have three other students show up and say, “Hey, I’m going to work outside of your office just in case I need your help.” Not having that has been an adjustment. You can’t have three people sitting outside your office right now. It just doesn’t work the same way. So I think that’s one of the reasons for the increased time demands I mentioned earlier. One of the people on our staff described it as, “All the dings.”
“I have my phone ringing, I have my text messages, I have Skype messages going off on my computer, I’m on Zoom.” There’s just so much that we have to monitor right now and make sure that we’re addressing. And I think our students are getting a lot of messages right now too -- a lot of emails from professors, emails from the university. We can’t stop the communicating, but we need to recognize that they’re getting inundated with information as well.
Q: The last thing I wanted to touch on was the Monday football staff meetings that Coach Norvell is holding — now virtually. Is that something you attend or do the football-specific advisers handle that?
A. The football academic team goes in for those. They’ve been having those through Zoom.
Q: OK, I was just curious to know what the interaction has been like with the new football staff from your group’s perspective.
A: Oh, they’ve been great. They’re really wonderful to work with. We’re very thankful for the support that we get from them. And I think right now, they are very focused on academics — especially because that’s one of the only things going on right now. So I’ve been extremely pleased with the football staff. They’ve been a serious help and support in this whole process.
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