Indiana University officials conducted two investigations into former football coach Kevin Wilsons treatment of injured players, according to a report from the Indianapolis Star on Saturday.Wilson, who resigned as Hoosiers coach Thursday over what athletic director Fred Glass called philosophical differences, was initially questioned about his treatment of injured players in April 2015, according to the report. In April 2015, Glass hired an outside law firm to conduct the inquiry, and he did so again in the past four to six weeks, sources familiar with the second investigation told ESPN.?According to the Star report Saturday, the initial investigation was prompted by complaints about the IU football programs treatment of former lineman Nick Carovillano, who played for the Hoosiers in 2014. On April 8, 2015, Carovillanos father, Dean, contacted IU associate athletic director Anthony Thompson to make a complaint on his sons behalf. Six days later, according to the Star, IU retained a law firm to investigate the allegations.?Dean Carovillano told ESPN on Saturday that his son suffered a back injury in practice in September 2014. When Nick Carovillano asked an Indiana trainer to examine his back, the trainer asked him if he had numbness in his legs. According to his father, when Carovillano said he didnt, the trainer told him, Then I wont treat your injury. A few days later, according to his father, Indianas trainers told Carovillano that he was suffering from shin splints and needed to stretch better. But when Carovillano returned home to Cincinnati a few weeks later, his parents noticed he could barely climb out of his car.That weekend, a doctor noticed Carovillano struggling to walk across the room at a social gathering. The doctor told him he needed to stop playing sports immediately, according to his father. When Carovillano returned to Bloomington after the weekend at home, he told trainers a doctor advised him to stop playing. He was examined by Indianas trainers and sent to a specialist in Indianapolis. The specialist diagnosed him with having bone fragments and three injured disks in his back.Hed been called every name in the book to keep practicing, Dean Carovillano said. He was a 19-year-old kid. He wanted to please his coaches, not be ridiculed, and wanted to make the team.After rehabbing his back for six months, Carovillano decided to leave Indiana in April 2015. When his parents drove to Bloomington to help him move out, Wilson and other IU coaches requested a meeting with them. They tried to persuade Carovillano to stay through the end of the semester so the teams graduation rate wouldnt decrease, according to his father.My son lost everything, Dean Carovillano said. He lost his scholarship. He has an injured back, and he was an emotional wreck.According to the Star, Glass met with Wilson on April 13, 2015, to discuss the allegations about his mistreatment of injured players. The next day, Glass sent Wilson a memorandum that included a warning: As you know, IU will not tolerate any behavior among you and your staff that penalizes, ostracizes, or criticizes any injured football player. I trust that you and your staff are abiding by this long-standing policy.According to the Star, the law firm Glass hired for the investigation interviewed 20 people and issued a 26-page report on May 1, 2015.An outside investigation has concluded that Nick did not receive inadequate medical care, that there is no evidence that the coaching staff exerted improper influence on the medical staff regarding the student-athletes medical care, Glass wrote in a memo to Wilson, which was obtained by the Star. But Glass also wrote, Even within the unique culture of football, there were behaviors that may create an unhealthy environment for injured players. This last conclusion was based on a variety of findings, including your own admission that you made jokes to injured players or implied that they are not useful members of the team.Some players said that they felt pressure or witnessed coaches pressuring others and indicated that they found it depressing and demoralizing to have coaches make such comments when they were already frustrated with their injuries. It was found that coaches appear to push players to work harder than they should when they have injuries that are unconfirmed by an outside test.Even after conducting the initial review into Wilsons conduct, Glass rewarded him with a raise and a six-year contract extension -- at $2.55 million per season -- through 2021 after he guided the Hoosiers to their first bowl appearance since 2007.During a news conference in Bloomington, Indiana, on Thursday, Glass said there was no smoking gun, no precipitating event that led to his decision to ask for Wilsons resignation. Glass said he was confident that no players medical issues were compromised under Wilson. Instead, Glass said the two werent on the same page in terms of leadership style.Carovillano, however, wasnt the only former Indiana player to complain about Wilsons treatment of him when injured.In interviews with ESPN this week, several former Hoosiers and/or their parents criticized Wilsons treatment of injured players and the medical care they received while playing for the team:-- Mark Booth, the father of former Indiana wide receiver Dominique Booth, told ESPN that his son suffered a concussion in practice a week before the 2015 season opener. After sitting out a week, Booth was supposed to gradually return to workouts. But after a 20-minute workout one day, Booth was told to run six miles, according to his father. When Booth returned home, he vomited and suffered severe headaches.His symptoms went haywire, Mark Booth said.Dominique Booth, who was ranked No. 225 in the ESPN 300 and the No. 2 prospect in Indiana as a senior at Pike High School in Indianapolis in 2014, received a medical redshirt and didnt play in 2015. The next spring, according to Booths father, Indianas coaches asked him to sign a medical waiver before he returned to the field, even though hed been medically cleared to play. Mark Booth said his son declined to sign the waiver and asked to be released from his scholarship.According to Mark Booth, IU medically disqualified his son to play without his consent. When they met with Wilson and other IU coaches this past spring, they were told Booth wouldnt be released from his scholarship.They held my son hostage, Mark Booth said. Wilson said he couldnt release him because he was one of the best recruits hed signed and it would hurt his recruiting base in Indianapolis.-- Former Indiana cornerback Laray Smith told ESPN that when he had a bump on his back shortly before the 2013 season, IU trainers told him it was only a bruise.Im a freshman, so Im not thinking anything, Booth said. Ill just listen to them. But it continued to hurt. I went to the doctor for a checkup and got an ultrasound. It was a blood clot, and they drained it and said, Youre better now.But after Smith returned to practice, the bump came back and was even bigger. He had surgery to remove the blood clot and returned to play in games a week or two later.I knew it was serious because it was a blood clot, said Smith, who left Indiana in July 2015 and now runs track at Delaware State. Now that Im older I know, but I wasnt thinking that way at 17 or 18. Its like, Youre good, youre going to play as a freshman.-- Former Hoosiers offensive lineman Bernard Taylor, who played under Wilson from 2011 to 14, told ESPN Radios The Right Time with Bomani Jones on Thursday that Wilsons treatment of players was ridiculous, but he didnt offer specifics.Dont get me wrong, hes a great coach and smart on the offensive side of things. But as far as the way he treated those cats, it was ridiculous, Taylor said. If you really want to go on a whole list, a whole tangent, things beyond injuries, its an entire list, and Ill be talking to you all day, man.-- An unnamed former Indiana player, who was a member of the 2011 team, said players worked hard not to be included on the injured list because of the consequences.The trainers would hate to go up and tell him about injured players because Wilson would [curse] them, said the player, who requested anonymity. Then hed go into the training room and tell the players, No, youre going to [expletive] practice, and, of course, the players would go practice.The player said Wilson also ridiculed Indianas players constantly for their poor play.As a human being and a person, he didnt treat people around the program with a lot of respect, the player said. He cursed us up and down, and Im sure that goes on [at] a lot of other places. But when someone is telling you from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day that you couldnt play on Oklahomas practice squad, it wears you down.Staff writers Chantel Jennings and Jared Shanker contributed to this report.Larry Csonka Womens Jersey . The Olympic champion curler and TSN curling analyst immediately went online to look at the Halls long list of honoured members. Thats when the enormity of the honour sunk in. Mike Gesicki Jersey . 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Third-seeded Murray had the easiest path to victory on New Years Eve, barely breaking a sweat during his 6-0, 6-0 win over 2,129th-ranked Qatari wildcard recipient Mousa Shanan Zayed.First Brexit, then Trump, then Cuba without Castro, but is this groggy planet of ours ready for the most improbable happening of all? Recent rumblings emanating from Dubai certainly suggest there is reason to believe it may be in the offing. Once played, once aborted, perpetually defying the combined brainpower of the games purported leaders, a World Test Championship is firmly back on the agenda. And the ICC, bless it, is contemplating ripping off the Americans.With Sri Lanka and Bangladesh having registered their understandable objections to a two-tier format, which has apparently been given the heave-ho, the latest idea on the table is a pair of six-team conferences, a modus operandi devised by Major League Baseball more than a century ago and subsequently adopted by the other three major US team sports. It makes sense in this context too, though this column remains convinced that the womens recent initiative - a combined series of T20, ODI and Test matches, with points awarded on a rising scale according to the length of the game - is the best option. That may be what will end up with, but for now lets examine the pros and cons of a conference system.First things first, namely the proposal to elevate Afghanistan and Ireland to Test (if not Full Member) status. The naysayers will reel off their time-dishonoured predictions. If Bangladesh cant win overseas, or Zimbabwe at home, what awful calamities will befall the newcomers should they have to play India or South Africa? Besides, the gap in class will surely devalue the status of the contest, and thus any ensuing records. Rugby union, though, has already gone through this existential ordeal and seems to have survived robustly enough, so lets not fret over that one any longer.The fact is that the international game, 140 years old next March and under siege as never before from the domestic product, has no choice but to expand, thereby encouraging more people to take up the game and aim for the pinnacle. Tradition and custom only get you so far these days.The trickiest element of a conference structure in a global cricketing context is the attendant baggage. Since India and Pakistan refuse to play each other for political reasons - and even if there were inter-conference matches, as happens in the US - they would have to be allocated to separate leagues, unless the concept of playing on neutral ground is embraced. So too, in the interest of balance, would Afghanistan and Ireland. This means that merely announcing a cut-off point and going strictly by the ICC rankings - the top team placed in Conference A, second-ranked in B, third-ranked in A, and so on - would be impractical.Seeding will be required - each conference should contain three of the six leading teams (according to the latest rankings) and two of the next four. In order to achieve a balance in conditions it would also make sense to split the four senior Asian teams up - two per conference.Keeping England and Australia apart would ensure they dont overdo matters as they have done lately, while making the delicious prospect of an Ashes final feasible. Ideally that showpiece should be a best-of-three series - one home, one away, and the decider, if necessary, on neutral turf. Of course, if the India-Pakistan standoff persists that would remove home advantage from the equation - not necessarily a bad thing.As for what were going to call these conferences, something memorable but impartial is required. So, rather than plump for Bradman and Grace, Warney and Murali, or Sachin and Brian, lets pay tribute to the men behind it all: Charles Alcock, the Surrey secretary who first hatched the idea of calling an international contest a Test match, then brought it to fruition at The Oval, and Abe Bailey, the South African businessman and cricket benefactor who dreamed up the inaugural world championship, the wet and spectacularly unsuccessful 1912 Triangular Tournament.Anyway, heres a glimpse of how it all might look: Why, though, stop at a final? What about semi-finals, each pitting the winner of a conference against the second-placed side from the other one? The chief reason against them is that playing them would run counnter to the pronouncement by ICC chief executive David Richardson, who stated during the recent Adelaide Test that the CEOs of the Full Member boards felt the number of Tests needed to be reduced from around 45 a year - the average over the past half-decade - to between 35 and 40.dddddddddddd And that acknowledgement stems, of course, from the implicit and growing realisation that if space isnt found for domestic T20 competitions sharpish then the international game may recede into insignificance. Fewer games but greater context is the mantra, and they wont find any quarrel here.Five to ten fixtures might not be a terribly big reduction were it not for the proposal to increase the number of competing teams by 20%. Still, as this column has previously suggested, there is a remedy, albeit one bound to provoke growls of derision and howls of disgust. Namely that, unless the protagonists decide otherwise, series will shrink into one-off matches. Given that so many already comprise just two Tests, this would be no bad thing, even if the realities of the ICCs brave new world did not decree it.One advantage the one-match series could confer would be to free up time for proper acclimatisation, thus preventing a recurrence of the current ludicrous nonsense in India, where England went directly into the Rajkot Test from another in Bangladesh. They will have played seven such games on the trot before Christmas supplies blessed relief. Even if a Mumbai 2nd XI and a Tamil Nadu 4ths had provided the opposition, match practice would have been infinitely preferable to nets. As for who plays whom and when, thats where the complexities really start. Overall, a home-and-away series per team per annum should be the minimum expectation, but if points are to be awarded only for series victories or draws (why not ten and five respectively, thus upholding the value of the latter?), then any meaningful final order will demand more than that. Playing, say, 15 series over four years - with each team tackling every other member of its conference at least once - would not only be a more accurate reflection of form and quality but would pave the way for a major ICC event every year: World T20, World Cup, Champions Trophy and World Test Championship.How, though, would we separate teams that have accrued the same number of points at the end of each cycle? Much the easiest method would be to take into account the results of individual contests, but that would disadvantage those least likely to stage them. Better, then, to have a playoff, the regulations for which would echo those for the final: played on neutral ground and timeless.Moreover, and perhaps most importantly of all, the conference system makes more sense than a hierarchical one because it would oblige the senior nations to play Afghanistan and Ireland. Even if that only amounts to one Test every four years, even if the sole aim is to pick up easy points, it would still be a vast improvement on the current situation, where Bangladesh, to cite but the most obvious and unjustified victims, are constantly undermined by a dearth of fixtures.That the ICC has yet to reach any agreement on any of this is indicative of the difficulties inherent in changing the face of international cricket to better suit times and tastes. Even so, to once again lament the hurdles as insurmountable (remember those plans for a 2017 Test Championship that were scuppered by the broadcasting fraternity but ultimately sunk by a lack of imagination?) would surely be the last word in defeatism.How, though, can a sport that talks so strenuously about the future not implement, as the barest of necessities, a means of anointing a world champion? With negotiations for a new broadcasting deal beckoning, the sages of the MCC World Cricket Committee having nodded their esteemed assent to a conference format at Mumbais Taj Mahal Palace this week, and an executive at one major free-to-air channel having expressed enthusiasm for such a venture to yours truly, the time for hesitation has well and truly passed. ' ' '
