The NCAA’s Division I Committee on Infractions
announced Tuesday that Ohio State women’s basketball, women’s golf and fencing programs were all found guilty of committing NCAA violations “over the course of several years.”
As punishment, all three programs have been placed on four years of NCAA probation and Ohio State has been fined $5,000 in addition to 3% of the fencing program budget and 1% of both the women’s basketball and women’s golf budgets. Under the terms of the probation, Ohio State will be required to “continue to develop and implement a comprehensive educational program on NCAA legislation to instruct coaches, the faculty athletics representative, all athletics department personnel and all institutional staff members with responsibility for recruiting” and file annual compliance reports to the NCAA indicating the progress made with that program.
Those penalties have been assessed in addition to
self-imposed penalties by Ohio State that included postseason bans for all three programs for the 2020-21 academic year as well as vacating women’s basketball and fencing wins in which ineligible athletes participated and scholarship reductions for those two programs in 2020-21. The Division I Committee on Infractions also imposed an additional 10% in scholarship reductions for the Ohio State fencing program in 2022-23.
Because Ohio State also had an NCAA infractions case involving the men’s swimming program in 2017, the NCAA also held a hearing to examine Ohio State’s compliance monitoring program. The NCAA concluded that a failure to monitor violation did not occur, though it did identify gaps in Ohio State’s compliance program that it has asked Ohio State to address.
The majority of violations found by the NCAA occurred within the fencing program. Former fencing coach Vladimir Nazlymov, who also received a 10-year show-cause penalty from the NCAA, was found to have “arranged, provided or directed other coaches to provide more than $6,000 in recruiting inducements to three prospects” and to have “personally provided or directed coaches to provide 18 student-athletes with more than $8,000 in impermissible benefits in the form of free access to his local sports club,” among other violations.
The women’s basketball program was punished as a result of violations committed by former associate head coach Patrick Klein, who also received a 10-year show-cause from the NCAA. Klein “initiated contact with student-athletes with the goal of forming personal relationships that exceeded coaching/student-athlete relationships” and “provided them with impermissible benefits, including paying for manicures, loaning money for rental cars, and purchasing textbooks for a student-athlete who was not on scholarship.”
