Teague: 2 drug positives revealed

Two Central Arkansas athletes tested positive for substances banned by the NCAA and will have to sit out a season unless they successfully appeal the findings, UCA Athletic Director Brad Teague said Monday.

Neither Teague nor UCA President Tom Courtway would identify the students or the sport in which they participated, citing a federal privacy law.

Teague said the students do not deny they took the substances.

“They thought it shouldn’t have been banned” and said they “didn’t think it was on the banned” list, Teague said.

Teague, responding to a request from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, released letters the NCAA sent him on Nov. 26.

One of them says the urine specimen provided by one student, whose name UCA redacted, on Nov. 5 through the NCAA’s year-round drug-testing program “contained the selective androgen receptor modulator (SARM) astatine, an NCAA banned substance.”

The second letter, also dated Nov. 26, says the other student, whose name UCA also redacted, had the NCAA banned substance anti-estrogen clomiphene” in a urine specimen taken Nov. 5.

In an interview, Teague said this was “not the first time we’ve had a student test positive.” He said someone does “about every other year.”

Confirmation of the drug positives came two days after former coach Clint Conque announced that he is leaving to take the head coaching job at Stephen F. Austin, one of UCA’s Southland Conference rivals.

Teague and Courtway said in separate interviews Monday that there is no correlation between the drug positives and Conque’s decision to leave UCA.

“Clint Conque was not in any shape, form or fashion, involved in that,” Courtway said. “He got another job. He was not asked to leave.”

Teague said athletes can buy some of the banned substances at health supplement stores. But a check at one such store in Little Rock showed it offered neither substance that the two UCA students are accused of using.

Sports, Pages 20 on 12/17/2013

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