Cyclone Alley found a new favorite chant during the men’s basketball teams’ two exhibition wins over Dubuque and EA Sports – “Free Lucca . free Lucca.”

If the student section’s chants are any indication, Cyclone Nation is not happy with the NCAA’s recent denial of freshman guard Lucca Staiger’s bid to become an NCAA amateur athlete.

Neither is Staiger.

“I was really frustrated and I was really shocked too, because I never thought something like that would happen,” Staiger said. “I worked hard the whole summer, took summer classes here at Iowa State.

“I thought everything was fine, and they just told me a week from the game that I can’t play, and it’s really tough when I can’t play.”

Staiger played for three seasons on the Ehingen club team in Germany, which is considered an amateur youth club by the German government.

Two players on the team received stipends that were determined as above necessary expenses by the NCAA, leading the NCAA to declare Ehingen a professional organization.

After applying for eligibility in the spring, Staiger spent the summer working with the ISU basketball team, attending classes and assuming he would be contributing to the Cyclones starting with the Nov. 1 exhibition against Dubuque.

Instead, he found out on Oct. 28 that he would not see a minute of playing time when the NCAA said Staiger and Washington State forward Fabian Boeke, who also played for Ehingen, would be ineligible for the 2007-08 season.

“It came out of nowhere,” Staiger said.

The result was a shocked athlete and frustrated coach in Greg McDermott.

“Virtually every kid in Europe had been a part of one of these clubs, and to wave a wand and then say that these two happen to be ineligible doesn’t make a lot of sense to me,” McDermott said. “It’s frustrating, and it hurts.”

Bylaw 12 of the NCAA Division I Manual defines a professional athletics team as an organized team that “provides any of its players more than actual and necessary expenses for participation on the team” – meaning Ehingen would be considered a professional team by NCAA bylaws. The bylaw also says an individual loses amateur status by competing on any professional athletics team.

“I’m not sure every NCAA rule is applicable in every situation, and I think this is one of those times where it’s not,” McDermott said.

The rule is not new, but the process of enforcing it is. This is the first year of the NCAA’s Amateur Certification Clearinghouse, which determines eligibility for international transfer students to play an NCAA sport.

Under this process, an athlete applies for amateur status and the NCAA determines whether the athlete is eligible to play. Stacey Osburn, associate director of public and media relations for the NCAA, said the old process left it up to each school to decide whether the individual was an amateur, but now the clearinghouse looks at it with submissions from individual schools.

“It is a shared responsibility of sharing the rules and making sure they’re followed and anything is reported up to it,” Osburn said. “It is a shared responsibility between not just the national office but between the schools. Coaches know the rule, so they should be able to define these issues early on so we can work through the process.”

In Staiger’s case, McDermott feels there was a break in the process. Although Staiger applied for status in the spring, he wasn’t informed of a denial until just a week before the first exhibition, leading McDermott to question the response time.

“That’s the most frustrating part of the whole process is how long it has taken. A lot of the interviews were done in October, September, should have been done in June and July,” McDermott said. “That really puts Lucca in a tough spot, and it’s just unfortunate that the NCAA wasn’t a little bit more prompt in some of their investigations.”

Iowa State’s next step is an appeal to the NCAA, which is being conducted by Josh Snyder, associate athletic director for compliance. Snyder declined on saying what specifically would go into the appeal, but he did say that getting the ruling overturned would be a difficult task.

“Past precedent would tell us that it’s unlikely,” Snyder said. “However, I think we have some extenuating circumstances in this case – they could be used to basically avoid past precedent, the difference between our case and some other cases.”

It is hoped the final ruling will come sometime by the end of this week, Snyder said, meaning the Cyclones could know by their season-opener on Friday against Winston-Salem State.

Staiger said he not only avoided taking payments, but he didn’t know anyone on the team who did.

“I played for a team to get better, and it’s not my business if they get paid or not, and I didn’t really care,” Staiger said. “I knew I didn’t get paid, and I thought the rule was if I don’t get paid and I don’t sign a contract when I go to school I’ll be eligible to play college basketball.

“But I didn’t really care about other people and if they got paid or not.”

Teammate Jiri Hubalek, who was ineligible for the first six games last year after the NCAA ruled he received benefits in junior college, said that Staiger had the whole team behind him.

“It’s just a tough situation for Lucca. He’s a great guy, a great player and he was working extremely hard to play, but now the matter is not in his hands,” Hubalek said. “We’ve just got to hope for the best and hope that he plays for us, because he is just a great addition to the team.”

In the meantime, Iowa State will prepare to fight for a lesser penalty than the entire year of ineligibility Staiger faces.

“We’ll do what we can with the appeal process and hope that in some way they take into consideration this particular case and not levee a full season of competition,” McDermott said. “I just think . the penalty for jaywalking isn’t the same for armed robbery, and in this case, it is.”

Until the NCAA thinks the same way, Staiger will have nothing to do but sit idly listening as the student section at Hilton demands his freedom.