Arthur Berman wrote: >at many schools athletes in the major sports >(which hockey may or may not be, but clearly is at schools such as BU or >Minnesota) are poorly paid employees whose payment (education) is >compromised by the terms of employment (a demanding practice and game >schedule.) This brings us to possibly the darkest travesty involved in college athletics: legally, the athletes are not employees. In every way that I can figure, they behave just like employees, but that is not their status. This means that they are not covered by any number of basic guarantees that the rest of us take for granted on our jobs. Scholarships can be revoked pretty much arbitrarily without recourse. I'm not familiar enough with the Travis Roy situation to know how BU handled it, but there have been other cases where a school denies responsibility for covering medical expenses incurred in the course of athletic events. Morally, I think this system is indefensible; legally, I suspect that it's on shaky ground. I'm waiting for someone to challenge this set-up in court. (Of course, one should note that I can't figure out how amateur drafts pass anti-trust muster either.) This is part of the cause of resistence to paying athletes any cash stipend, since that would work to strip the veneer away. If such a development does occur, it will turn the world of college athletics upside down. It might very well lead to a few schools essentially converting their programs into actual professional operations and the rest would move back closer to club sports. Less entertaining, perhaps, but less hypocritical, too. J. Michael Jackson HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.