Designing the first year-end attestation under the House settlement

The House v. NCAA settlement created new rules for how Division I schools share revenue with athletes, award scholarships, and manage rosters. At the end of each cap year, schools attest that they followed those rules.

This was the first year, with an attestation window from July 1 to September 1. There was no process to inherit, no prior cycle to learn from, and no benchmark for how long it should take. The people involved ranged from coaches and compliance officers to athletic directors and university presidents, across 5,800+ Division I teams.

A year-end close-out process in CAPS. Schools validate their revenue share, scholarship, and roster data and correct what's wrong, then move through a five-step sign-off chain.

1. Assign attestorsEach school sets up who signs off at every level.
2. Coach attestationCoaches attest for each of their sports.
3. Compliance officerThe compliance office reviews and signs off.
4. Athletic directorThe athletic director signs off for the department.
5. President or chancellorThe head of the institution gives the final attestation.

To keep every school informed along the way, I built personalized progress reports for each member school and automated their delivery. How I built the reports

I worked with conference general counsels and athletic directors to get buy-in on the process, since some requirements came from NCAA bylaws based on the House settlement. With our development partners at LBi, I designed the flow and wrote the requirements.

One decision I owned: keeping attestation inside CAPS instead of building a separate microsite. That reduced data privacy risk and cut development time.

Because this was a first-time process, the results are measured against the goal rather than a prior year.

Nearly all 319 schools completed attestation (96%) in the first year of a process that didn't exist before.

Reconciling incorrect or incomplete data took a lot of surge support. Next cap year, I'd build two things:

• Customer-facing tools that let schools correct or update their agreement data themselves.
• Internal support tools that let our team reconcile rosters without engineering help.