Returning student not one to be deterred by NCAA rules 

By Rich Seeley

Like other students starting classes at college this fall semester, Bonnie Frankel exudes the youthful optimism and enthusiasm that you associate with eager college students. 

 

She looks you in the eye and says, “I love music, I love books, I love everything." 

Here's a student who is not afflicted with the cynicism that often catches up with college alums in middle age. 

Yet, Bonnie Frankel is middle-aged. At 46, she will be more than twice the age of many of her fellow students in classes at Loyola Marymount University this fall. 

On top of that, she has lived through the kind of hard knocks that usually kill youthful enthusiasm. But after every hard knock, she bounced back. 

At 32, she was hit with cancer and refused to give in to it. In her early 40s, she was divorced and made a commitment to start a new life by going back to school. 

She went back to Santa Monica College where she had started her college career in 1962. Back then, by her own admission, she was not a good student. She ended up on academic probation and then dropped out. 

It virtually took a judicial order to get her to resume her college studies almost three decades later. At the conclusion of her divorce proceedings in 1988, the judge told her: “Go back to school and find out what you want to do.”

A lot of people in their 40s might have resented a judicial opinion suggesting that they go back to college. But Bonnie Frankel took the judge's advice and ran with it. Literally.

With a freshman’s enthusiasm, she started over and did well academically. Then, always looking for a new challenge, she tried something most middle-aged college students wouldn’t have even considered. She went out for SMC’s women’s track team.

The next oldest member on the team was 20 years younger than Bonnie. Although she had only been a casual beach jogger, she found she could run 3,000 meters competitively at the community college level.

“I had no idea I would take to track,” she says. “But I took to it.”

She also discovered that in the classic sense, college athletics enhanced her academic performance. Running got the blood flowing to her brain. The discipline on the track paid dividends in the classroom. 

When the woman who had originally been in SMC's class of '64, graduated in June with the class of '91, she felt ready to move on to a four-year college. 

She selected Loyola Marymount to pursue her quest for a B.A. and immediately contacted the track coach's office to see if she could also continue her college athletic career. 

The initial response was positive but then she hit a wall. Although she had no way of knowing it at the time, under NCAA rules, her eligibility to compete in a four-year college's athletic program had run out in 1966. Once she took her first full semester of classes in 1962, the clock started ticking. 

The NCAA allows students four years for their college athletic career. Like all rules, the intention is good. It is designed to reserve college athletics for undergraduates. It prevents universities from building professional-type teams with 10-year veterans playing college football or basketball through their 20s.

 

But in Bonnie Frankel's case, she sees it as unfair. She believes it discriminates against her and other older returning students who resume their undergraduate studies in middle age only to find themselves locked out of college athletics. 

So far, the people she has talked to at the NCAA have been sympathetic but as they say in sports, the rules are the rules. 

But Bonnie, with her 1960's college student idealism still intact, is determined to change the rules. 

She is planning to wage a publicity campaign and appeal to the public's sense of 

fairness. 

And like many students, she feels her college experience has helped her discover something important about herself that will guide her through the rest of her life. 

"I like to change things,” she says, “and make them right.” 

After she completes her four-year degree, she's considering going to law school so she can learn more about how to change the rules. 

Published Sunday, September 8, 1991, The [Torrance, Calif.] Daily Breeze Westside edition.