In modern sports many athletes at the professional level choose to turn to performance-enhancing drugs for several reasons— maybe to keep a spot on a team where the annual salary is a healthy seven figures maybe to win a gold medal or maybe to be featured on a cereal box. At Pepperdine though athletes are held to high standards through the combined effort of the University and the National Collegiate Association of Athletics to keep their players clean of illegal performance-enhancing substances.
Senior volleyball player Sean Grubbs said the University’s athletic department holds its athletes to high expectations.
“They always expect high standards of us Grubbs said. Marv [Dunphy] always expects me to do my best and he holds the same standards for the rest of the guys on the team.”
In the NCAA’s official handbook on rules and regulations there are eight types of drug classes that are specified as being illegal for students to consume while playing a sport in the NCAA. These classes include: stimulants anabolic agents alcohol and beta-blockers diuretics street drugs peptide hormones and analogues anti-estrogens and Beta-2 agonists.
There are many drugs and steroids that fall beneath these eight categories and a complete list of banned substances can be found in the NCAA handbook that each athlete receives at the start of their season. The NCAA also warns athletes that dietary supplements like weight gainers and vitamin packs are not well regulated and some of the ingredients in these products may make an otherwise negative drug test come up positive.
A student may be tested after winning an NCAA championship or simply by being chosen at random by the association. Once chosen for a NCAA drug test the student athlete is notified and must report to an official testing facility at the appropriate time specified in the letter of notification. The penalty for not showing up to a test will be the same penalty as failing a drug test.
According to the Pepperdine University Athletics Drug Education Counseling and Testing Program Pepperdine holds the same standards as the NCAA in regard to performance-enhancing drug use by student-athletes. The eight types of restricted drug classes mentioned in the NCAA handbook are also prohibited at Pepperdine but the university has more flexibility in terms of testing its athletes. The university recommends teams to meet as deemed necessary to discuss the potential harms of substance abuse to educate the students at the coach’s discretion. Similar but much more frequently Pepperdine’s drug tests are administered randomly throughout the year to its student athletes. Reasonable suspicion also gives Pepperdine’s athletic department an opportunity to test a student outside of the random testing. Like the NCAA’s established rule a no-show to a Pepperdine drug test (students are notified within 24 hours of the test) will result as a negative test result requiring the student to attend a mandatory counseling session. A second positive test for a Pepperdine athlete will result in a suspension of the next scheduled contest and three mandatory counseling sessions. With a third positive result the athlete will become ineligible and any athletic grant will be stripped away from the student for the following year. Pepperdine sophomore water polo player Worth Glenn thinks Pepperdine’s drug testing policy is a fair and a much better way to keep student honest than the NCAA’s policy.”Pepperdine’s sports’ drug testing policy and system I feel is more accurate and timely than that of the NCAA’s system Glenn said. The NCAA tends to test in seldom therefore Pepperdine’s system gives all the athletes in every sport the opportunity to compete in a fair drug free environment.” Pepperdine student athletes as a community say using performance enhancing drugs is not an honorable way to compete in sports and it does not hold the values Pepperdine was founded upon.”I’d feel kind of betrayed because of what we stand for as Pepperdine athletes Glenn said. I’d feel embarrassed for them because they represent us. One athlete represents the entire athletic community at Pepperdine and with that comes a lot of repercussion from the world.”Kasey Crider of Pepperdine’s men’s volleyball team share Glenn’s views on keeping his performance honorable but he also feels his team’s performance has no need to rely on drugs to be successful.”Our team works hard and we perform our best every match Crider said. No one on our team has ever felt the need to take any kind of illegal enhancers because we know we can be successful with the time and effort we put into practice and matches.” Pepperdine’s women’s basketball team Head Coach Julie Rousseau said she thinks taking performance-enhancing drugs take the true spirit of competition out of sports. “It [sport] loses its authenticity when you have something else that boosts your ability… the true athlete really understands that Rousseau said. I think your God-given gift is what God gave you and you do the best with that through the hard work you put in and it does take commitment and it does take time. You have to put the work in to make it authentic.”Rousseau said students who take performance-enhancing drugs stand to lose much more than a scholarship or a position on a team. She also had thoughts on the integrity of student-athletes that consider using performance-enhancing drugs. “There is more to lose than there is to gain Rousseau said. You lose more— you lose integrity your integrity and character is always going to be in question.”In the NCAA’s handbook an athlete who tests positive for illegal substances will be forever removed from the association literally shattering any dreams the athlete may have about going professional. Not only will the NCAA remove a student from the association but dismissal from the athlete’s university is also a possibility. According to the NCAA around 126000 student-athletes are given scholarships every year. Pepperdine student-athletes on scholarship agree that keeping their scholarship and respect in the NCAA is more important to them than winning with the help of illegal substances.
