Scott Kretchmar walks into his office in Rec Hall every day and logs onto his computer, always knowing what to expect -- an e-mail explaining how many extra hours a team will be on the road away from campus.

As the Faculty Athletic Representative to the NCAA, one of Kretchmar's most important responsibilities, and perhaps most time consuming, is his job of keeping track of any schedule changes for athletic teams.

He tracks all excused absences each semester and athletic eligibility in both grade point average and academic progress.

He is the man who coaches and administrators come to, call or e-mail when an amendment needs to be made to the "75-hour rule," as it is known within the Faculty Senate Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics.

The rule states that no team or student-athlete can be absent from class for more than 75 hours per semester, and if an athlete misses one day of classes, it is considered missing nine hours.

Every Big Ten school, except Michigan, has some form of the rule; it's just the time that varies. And Penn State's policy is among the strictest.

"Within the committee, the 75-hour rule is definitely a policy that gets more review than others," Kretchmar said.

These reviews are most often brought up in the senate committee every three years by coaches who plead their case in the hopes that the committee will increase the number of hours teams can be away from campus.

The majority of sports that have the toughest time with the rule are spring sports such as baseball, softball, and men's and women's track and field -- most of which have talked to Kretchmar at one point or another to see if bringing up the policy to the senate committee is a worthwhile endeavor for the teams.

"I respect the decision to monitor our class hours, but it is difficult because there isn't a lot of flexibility," track and field coach Beth Alford-Sullivan said.

A policy within the 75-hour rule that Alford-Sullivan calls a "nightmare" is a team's hours getting docked if it decides to leave for competition during its normal practice hours.

Normal practice hours don't count toward the 75-hour rule.

Because of this, many teams are forced to leave on late-night bus rides after practice.

For the Penn State softball team, it is lucky if during these bus trips it gets to the hotel earlier than 11 p.m.

"I never tell my team that we are at a competitive disadvantage, but we are," softball coach Robin Petrini said. "After a while, the players and coaches become so exhausted by the travel that it really takes a physical toll on everyone and affects performance."

Petrini, who was a coach at Northwestern for eight years, said that the Wildcats' softball team never had to deal with as many problems of hours and days away from campus like Penn State does.

This type of problem never occurs at Northwestern, which does not count Big Ten competition when calculating the number of hours and days its teams are away.

"The policy here is far more crippling than at Northwestern," Petrini said.

"There we could get on the dirt, have a good meal and get a good night's sleep."

Now, for Petrini and the rest of the Penn State softball team, sit-down dinners have been replaced with airport and roadside meals at Qboda, Panda Express and McDonald's.

Just three weeks ago, the Penn State baseball team was also forced to leave for Purdue after 6 p.m. because it could not leave before practice was over at 5 p.m. -- even though West Lafayette, Ind., is nearly nine hours away by bus.

These late-night bus trips are just one of the things Robbie Wine has had to adjust to since becoming the head coach four years ago. As an assistant coach at Oklahoma State, Wine said the baseball team had much more down time to relax and take it easy before the coming day's game.

At Iowa, if any team leaves campus during its regular practice hours, it does not go against the allotted number of eight class days per semester it is allowed to miss.

"Why not allow teams to leave around 3 p.m., which is when most sports practice anyway?" Petrini asked.

"It would allow everyone much more flexibility and not create a competitive disadvantage."

For Alford-Sullivan, also cramming two seasons of a sport (indoor and outdoor track and field) into the span of one semester and only missing 75 hours during scheduled classes can be quite difficult.

Alford-Sullivan has a hard time staying within the 75-hour policy because her team, along with many others at Penn State, is docked hours when it goes to Big Ten championships.

"With us getting docked nine hours per day, we usually wind up missing a good 27 hours, if not more, because of the championships," Alford-Sullivan said.

Through the 75-hour rule, teams that are guaranteed to go to Big Ten championships are docked those hours, while sports that are not guaranteed spots in the championships are not.

In other words, if sports like baseball and softball, which have to qualify for the Big Ten championships, do end up qualifying, no hours are docked from them.

But for sports like track and field, which automatically get an invite to the championships, hours are docked from the allotted 75.

Yet, Kretchmar still believes 75 hours is a reasonable number.

"It has worked well at Penn State and so someone will say on the committee, 'Why fix something that isn't broken?' " Kretchmar said.

Even though Kretchmar agrees with the specific policies and rules put in place by the senate committee, he can still understand coach's difficulties with the rule.

"I sympathize with coaches who have tough scheduling issues, yet it is a matter of priorities here at Penn State," Kretchmar said.

When the track and field program recently went out to Oregon for the Pepsi Team Challenge, other schools, including Minnesota, were there a day earlier than Penn State. That allowed other Big Ten programs to become more familiar with the track and its conditions.

For baseball and softball, this type of competitive disadvantage starts even before the regular season begins.

Needing competition in the winter months to get ready for the spring season, both sports must travel to compete -- yet because of the 75-hour rule, teams cannot afford to waste their hours in winter, when they have Big Ten road trips in the spring.

So, because of it, both teams do not get in as much competition in the winter as they would like.

"Now is when we need to be playing are best baseball, but we can't do this unless we play enough competitive games in the winter to get ready," Wine said.

The senate committee has been known in recent years to hear from coaches who come to the meetings and plead their case, granting waivers for a specific event or for scheduling snafus with a delayed flight or a competition pushed back, something that happened to women's volleyball just this past season.

Yet, this could not be said for Alford-Sullivan when she wanted to add a track and field meet in March. She hoped to take a handful of athletes to participate in a special meet in Jamaica, yet the faculty senate didn't approve it because the students would miss two days extra days of classes.

Because the majority of members on the senate committee are faculty members, many believe academics should be the main concern for student-athletes.

"The reality is that these are student-athletes," said Paul Clark, vice chair on the committee. "The student part is every bit as important as the athlete part and that has been Penn State's philosophy."

With this type of emphasis on academics for student-athletes, some coaches have made it a priority to recruit players they know can handle the strain that comes along with attending Penn State and abiding by its athletic policies.

"Knowing the demands Penn State puts on its student athletes, it does me no good to recruit a kid who could easily become academically ineligible," Petrini said. "We will red flag athletes who we think may be in danger before they get on campus and make sure to keep an eye on them."

While sports like these have difficulties with the 75-hour rule, other bigger sports do not.

Sports like football, basketball and volleyball, which charter flights, do not have to worry as much about coming close to the 75-hour limit.

"Football will never get caught because of their schedule," Kretchmar said. "They have one of the lowest, maybe the lowest, missed time amounts we have.

"Even if they didn't charter they would still be low because of their relatively short season, so they are easy to deal with."

Basketball, which is know for it relatively long season, doesn't run into trouble either because its season is spread over two semesters, so they get 75 hours during each.

The committee's continual backing of this rule and its policies has, in the process, also upheld its reputation as a school that places heavy emphasis on its academics, something that continues to pay dividends for the school.

Penn State was recently recognized by the NCAA for having five teams earn four-year APR scores in the top 10 percent nationally during the 2006-2007 academic year, a mark which was second in the Big Ten.

"I think we are leaders in giving our student-athletes a legitimate experience as a student and believe that we are a model that we would like other universities to follow," Clark said.

Yet, even with the success of these athletes academically, coaches throughout Penn State's athletic programs have expressed a desire to still see the policy changed.

Other ideas that have been mentioned to update the policy have included: counting every student-athletes hours on an individual basis, not counting Big Ten championships in the 75-hours, and having different hour amounts for every sport.

"Everyone thinks they have a simpler idea or something to fix the policy," said Susan Delaney-Sheetz, the associate athletic director and a member of the senate committee. "We can't please everyone, yet we believe that the policy in place right now is the best for everyone as a whole.."