In pondering this question, I came to the realization that the people who
will probably be hurt most by the sanctions against Maine, specifically the
loss of scholarships, are student-athletes (SAs) who would never have gone
to Maine anyway.
 
Bear with me. :-)  In those years that Maine has fewer scholarships to
offer, the SAs that Maine would have signed will in all likelihood receive
and accept offers from other schools instead, because Maine is able to
recruit SAs of a high enough caliber that other schools usually want them
too.
 
Let's say one of those SAs winds up at Merrimack.  (I choose Merrimack so
no one thinks I am picking on their school; this could happen almost
anywhere.)
 
Let's also say that one of the other SAs Merrimack recruited and would have
made an offer to, is not as highly regarded by other schools and does not
receive any other offers.  When Merrimack makes out its list of who to
extend offers to, this SA is the "odd man out"; if they have five to offer,
he is number six.  All of the top five accept and number six winds up with
no offers.
 
The indirect result is that because of the Maine sanctions, an SA who would
have been able to attend college on scholarship and play DivI hockey, would
not be able to do so.
 
Because there are a limited number of DivI hockey scholarships available,
and that number has just been reduced by a few more for the next few years,
it is almost guaranteed that this scenario will occur several times over
the next few years.
 
I'm not suggesting that this should argue against the decision nor that
colleges have a duty to provide hockey scholarships to people.  However,
this is an interesting and unfortunate side effect of the situation, one
that will affect people who we will probably never even hear of.  The
"silent victims", as it were.
 
BTW, again, I believe that it is too bad that Maine's innocent players will
not be able to compete for an NCAA title, and I am not comfortable with the
decision to effectively punish those innocent players.   Yet, I don't think
it can be denied that even those players will not suffer as much as SAs in
the scenario I just outlined.  I think this is something that Maine and
non-Maine people alike need to consider.
 
---                                                                   ---
Mike Machnik                   [log in to unmask]            *HMM* 11/13/93
*****       Unofficial Merrimack Hockey home page located at:       *****
*****   http://www.tiac.net/users/machnik/MChockey/MChockey.html    *****