As a former Division I basketball coach with more than 360 wins in 18 seasons, Mike Jarvis has seen it all. From coaching future Hall-of-Famer Patrick Ewing at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, to taking Boston University and George Washington University to the NCAA Tournament, to leading St. John's University to the Elite Eight and an NIT championship, Jarvis has a good understanding of the challenges that face student athletes. One of these challenges is the struggle to balance the intense practices and traveling required of athletes with the demands of a full-time college workload.

Jarvis went to VBrick Systems with a challenge: Take the company's video technology and use it in a way that would help the student athletes he'd once mentored and coached keep up with their studies. The result is the Promise Initiative, a program that lets student athletes avoid missing lessons by accessing classes virtually from anywhere in the world.

Based on VBrick's EtherneTV technology, the Promise Initiative gives student athletes the ability to watch live or recorded broadcasts of their classes on their computers. The videos can be tailored to fit various formats, so they can be streamed through the internet or even downloaded onto an iPod for watching while on a plane or bus. By placing video technology in each classroom, every class or lecture at a school or university can be recorded and stored in digital format on a video-on-demand server.

"Student athletes certainly have additional challenges in front of them," said Pat Cassella, senior director of marketing for VBrick. "They're not always going to be able to be in the classroom and participate in a live manner. So it's important that student athletes have the ability to have some level of interaction and ... not miss a class."

VBrick's goals with the Promise Initiative are to increase the grade-point averages of student athletes, raise their graduation rate to 85 percent, and eliminate missed classes. In September, the NCAA reported a 77-percent graduation success rate for Division I athletes. This was up from 76 percent last year. The NCAA has set a goal of an 80-percent graduation rate for all Division I athletes.

A major stumbling block to student athletes receiving a high-quality education is the difficulty in scheduling classes. Many courses they might like to take "conflict with practice times or might fall on a day that the team is usually traveling a lot," said Jarvis in an interview with eSchool News. "Youngsters--many times on their own volition, or sometimes after being encouraged--choose not to take certain courses because of these conflicts."

He added: "In order to stay eligible, these youngsters will take the easiest courses available. ... It's almost impossible for most student athletes to get anywhere [near] the same quality of education that regular students get, because of the [number] of classes they miss."