As a matter of timing, things couldn’t have been worse for the University of Illinois men’s tennis team.

On April 28, the NCAA shot down Illinois’ final plea to be removed from the now-infamous list of schools with “hostile and abusive” American Indian nicknames and mascots. Five days later, the NCAA announced seedings and regional hosting sites for this year’s tennis championship.

Illinois, seeded No. 7, was the only team among the top 16 not opening on its home court. And this wasn’t an oversight.

The program had become the first to feel the brunt of an NCAA policy that has bounded in the past nine months from threat to reality.

Florida State escaped the conversation last September when, a month after debuting on the NCAA’s hit list, the Seminoles were removed thanks to support from the local tribe. Three other schools since then have similarly been pulled from the list. But the debate only has escalated elsewhere as schools such as Illinois and the University of North Dakota have exhausted appeals that appear to leave litigation as their last resort.

UND, also rejected for the second and final time on April 28, could be forced to remodel everything from basketball jerseys to the hockey arena. The NCAA policy states that a school with offending logos and nicknames cannot host championship play and must cover up all images when playing in championships on the road.

Officials at UND, home of the Fighting Sioux since the 1930s, haven’t even begun to tally the cost of complying with the new policy.

“Where we’re at right now is calculating litigation costs,” says Phil Harmeson, senior associate to UND’s president and the school’s faculty athletic representative.The financial stake is less at Illinois.

“We’re not like North Dakota, where we’d have to sandblast our multimillion-dollar building,” says Tom Hardy, the executive director of Illinois’ office for university relations.

Since first appearing on the NCAA’s list, Illinois has appealed with mixed results. The association conceded that “Illini” and “Fighting Illini” don’t directly refer to American Indian culture but rather the state’s name. But Illinois has remained on the list because of Chief Illiniwek, the American Indian icon _ not considered a mascot _ who performs during home basketball, football and volleyball games. He never performs at tennis matches.

Images of the chief haven’t appeared on team uniforms since 1989, so the Illini are faced only with eliminating the halftime tradition and not stockpiles of branded merchandise or equipment.But the central question has evolved beyond the morality of nicknames or the logistics of changing them.

“Are you an organization whose core is to, in essence, referee the games and take care of technical issues?” Harmeson asks of the NCAA. “Or are you (trying to be) an engine of social engineering?”

Any lawsuit likely would ignore the specifics of the new policy and instead question the NCAA’s ability to tell an individual school what to do.

“It’s their option to pursue a lawsuit,” says Bob Williams, an NCAA spokesman. “But we’re confident we will prevail in any lawsuit because we feel that we have the authority and the responsibility to conduct our championships in an environment that’s free of racial stereotyping.”

Five of the 19 targeted schools already have changed their nicknames, or plan to do so. But the NCAA maintains it isn’t forcing any switches. The association has stopped short in saying that it merely has the right to control its 88 postseason championships, which schools participate in by voluntarily joining the NCAA.

“The school is going to say you’re effectively requiring us to change it _ and I think that’s what the NCAA wants,” says Prof. Matt Mitten, director of the National Sports Law Institute at Marquette University. “But courts have said when an institution joins a private association, one of the things you have to do is comply with their rules.”

Harmeson counters that UND’s voluntary membership in the NCAA is anything but. Like administrators at other schools, he has raised legal questions of both antitrust implications and freedom of expression.

Mitten, though, points out that the courts traditionally have deferred to the NCAA’s authority. And while schools may argue that the policy was founded on a sense of political correctness, he says, they’ll have a hard time demonstrating that it is fundamentally irrational.

Several schools, in appeals with increasingly heavy legal jargon, have questioned the NCAA’s ability to make the new policy without a vote of the full membership. The 20-member executive committee unanimously adopted the policy last August, to the shock of many university presidents, including FSU’s T.K. Wetherell.

Williams says that the NCAA’s own bylaws draw a distinction between legislation, voted on and adopted by the membership, and policy, which is determined by the association itself.

But the implementation of that policy has been just as galling to some presidents.”I think the level of hypocrisy from the NCAA is just dumbfounding,” says Dr. Mitchell Zais, the president of Newberry College in South Carolina.

FSU, Utah, Central Michigan and Mississippi College were removed from the list after proving they had the blessing of local namesake tribes like the Seminole Tribe of Florida. Newberry College has had less luck with the more generic nickname “Indians.”

The school already has lost one appeal and is preparing a second one more closely vetted by lawyers.

“The worst thing that could happen to Native Americans is that their proud history and tradition would be replaced by images of casinos and tax-free cigarettes,” says Zais, arguing that Newberry’s nickname celebrates a kind of cowboys-and-Indians bravery and tradition almost extinct in today’s pop culture. “At least we are upholding that tradition in some small way.”

Several American Indian groups have countered loudly that they don’t feel any tradition is being served or honored by college sports teams. The disapproval of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is one of the primary reasons North Dakota hasn’t had the success of FSU in appealing to the NCAA.The tribe’s chairman also isn’t comfortable with any school being granted a reprieve.

“In most of the world, and America in particular, (people) don’t look at individual Indian tribes, they look at us as a collective race of people,” says Ron His Horse Is Thunder. “Even when you talk about the Seminoles, the image they use doesn’t have a name on the bottom saying `Seminoles.’ Ultimately, the image people see is an image of all Native Americans, and in doing so, they continue to allow people who are racist to continue to be racist.”

Some of the smaller schools on the list have opted simply to change their nicknames, not having the money to pursue a long legal battle, or the political clout of a big state university.

Administrators at Chowan University, with its 800 students in Murfreesboro, N.C., never even considered filing an appeal over the “Braves” name.

Chowan recently has expanded from a college to a university and has been in the process of reclassifying its athletic program from Division III to Division II.

“One thing weighed heavily on our minds, and that’s that there’s no sense going to war with the NCAA when you’re trying to get something from them that’s very important,” Chowan President Christopher White says. “We saw very quickly it was not in our best interest to fight.”

The university recently unveiled its new nickname, capping a process that has been incorporated into the school’s larger rebirth. The new name, “Hawks,” more subtly honors a bird considered holy by the local American Indian tribes. Chowan’s insignia, previously a capital C with a feather dangling to the side, will remain the same. Consider it now a hawk feather.

© 2006, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).

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