In this case, the punishment will be the elimination of summer recruiting in 2002 (after only a one-week window in 2001), and it will have a profound effect on college basketball in both locker rooms. For those of you who have spent the last decade re-reading Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, summer basketball has become at best sleazy and at worst a cesspool, as AAU coaches have used their leverage with players to influence college choices. And that leverage has translated into some pretty ugly stuff, fueled in part by shoe company money, and turned the summer tournament circuit into a cash-and-carry meat market.

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Or so many coaches and administrators would have everyone believe. There are some AAU coaches who are just as devoted to the game and to the players as high school coaches (who are not necessarily paragons of virtue), and there are many players (Edwina Brown, to name one) who have benefited enormously from summer tournament exposure. But the negatives, on the men's side at least, finally overwhelmed the positives, and the NCAA cracked down.

Of course, the problems were much less severe in the women's game, because there's less money there, but there's little doubt that the recruiting rules will be the same for both genders -- which means that now women's coaches, with a smaller recruiting budget than the men, will not be able to see a whole bunch of blue-chip prospects on one plane ticket. Instead of flying to Oklahoma City, say, and getting a look at 30 outstanding players at one time, it will take 30 separate plane tickets to see those players during the winter high school season.

Unless, of course, those players happen to be within driving distance of Enormous State University -- or Small Private College. In that case, scouting is easy, and a much better use of limited coaching staff time than hanging around airports waiting for late flights.

That, in a nutshell, will be the biggest impact of the new rule. A few schools with huge recruiting budgets will still be able to track down players all over the nation, but as long as the summer window is closed, coaches are going to be forced to spend more time looking for, and at, local talent.

There are several upsides to this shift in emphasis. First, colleges might wind up with more local players on their rosters, which will encourage local fans to come to the games. The women's game still needs to tend to its grass roots, and there's nothing more grassroots than having Amy Allstar play for her hometown college. Second, inner-city kids will get more of a chance to impress some coaches. As the summer system is presently designed, it takes money, and quite a bit of it, to play on a traveling team. Suburban girls are much more likely to be able to pony up a couple grand to travel around for six weeks than girls from poorer areas, so the suburban girls get more exposure. Now, however, coaches will be staying home more, and they will have more time to spend checking out the athletes downtown -- and they might uncover some gems that might have previously been overlooked.

On the other hand, the more remote schools will find it tougher to scare up talent. Those colleges far from population centers will still have to recruit by plane, and the lack of the summer window will have a serious impact on their budgets. And it will hurt every team, not to mention the game as a whole, to have assistants away from practice during the season, because the more coaching, the better the players become.

Despite a Sweet 16 berth, the new rules will probably prevent UAB coach Jeannie Milling from recruiting outside the Southeast.(AP)

But this particular train has already left the station, thanks to some serious abuses on the men's side. There are some coaches who think the rule won't last and, like some other NCAA innovations, will disappear after a year or two -- but I think they're wrong. The people pushing this are the college presidents, who have the final say, and the whining of the coaches is not going to elicit much sympathy. Every team will, after all, still have a bunch of talented players, and some teams will, after all, still win a lot of games. And though attendance at some schools might drop if the new recruiting rules affect on-court performance, attendance at other schools will likely rise in turn.

In fact, if schools now must recruit more locally, that means players from large metropolitan areas are more likely to stay close to home -- which means teams in large metropolitan areas will become stronger.

From a purely practical point of view, that's a good thing, because large metropolitan areas tend to have lots of media, and those media will cover winning teams, regardless of gender. Sure, it's nice if Louisiana Tech is great, but building a fan base in Ruston isn't nearly as good for the women's game as building a fan base in Houston or Los Angeles or Chicago.

But good or bad, the summer window will slam shut in a couple of years, and along with it an entire cottage industry based on matching college coaches and high school players will disappear. The game, however, will remain the same, and in the long run, that's all that really matters.