DENVER - The Western Athletic Conference announced today that Fresno State must vacate the 29 games its women's basketball team played during the 2007-08 regular season, along with the three games it won in the 2008 WAC Basketball Tournament. The team must also vacate both their WAC regular season and WAC Tournament championships.
This comes as a result of the ineligible participation by Fresno State student-athlete Emma Andrews during 2007-08 in which she started 28 of the 29 games during the regular season. Andrews also started and played in the three WAC Tournament games. In late March 2008 it was discovered that while in high school in her native country of Australia, Andrews played sparingly with a professional team during the 2005 and 2006 seasons. She was declared ineligible per NCAA rules in the spring of 2008 and sat out the entire 2008-09 season and will miss the first three games of the 2009-10 season.
The WAC Code calls for a five-person committee to review cases of a student-athlete participating while ineligible. The committee is comprised of the WAC Council liaison for the particular sport; two faculty athletics representatives; an athletics director or senior woman administrator and the conference office compliance officer.
In this case, the committee took into consideration the amount of participation by Andrews during the 2007-08 season along with her performance contribution to the team in those 29 regular season games and three WAC tournament games. While there were mitigating circumstances regarding her participation on the professional team in Australia, the committee believed that her participation and contribution warranted Fresno State vacating the season. As a result, all games during the season will be denoted by an asterisk which indicates the contest has been vacated. No coaching records, team records or individual statistics will be affected.
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