Emmert: NCAA didn’t ban Guy’s wedding registry

3:02 pm | April 4, 2019 | Go to Source | Author:

6:38 PM ET

MINNEAPOLIS — If you’re a collegiate athlete and you’re engaged to be married, don’t worry.

The NCAA says it is not a violation for your family members and friends to shower you with wedding gifts.

Mark Emmert, NCAA president, said athletes can set up wedding registries after Virginia‘s Kyle Guy told reporters at the Final Four at U.S. Bank Stadium that the NCAA had instructed him and his fiancée to shut down their wedding registry after a website published the link following Virginia’s win over Purdue in the Elite Eight.

Guy said he was surprised when he was told to take it down. But Emmert said that’s “inaccurate” and added he’s not sure how that message was communicated to Guy since it’s not an NCAA violation to have a wedding registry.

“I heard about that just as I was walking in just now, and I immediately grabbed my people and said, ‘What’s this all about?'” Emmert said during his annual Final Four news conference on Thursday. “What we know right now is that nobody in the NCAA said anything of the sort. We don’t know what the source of that information was, whether it came from the institution or not. It’s certainly not the case that that’s a violation of NCAA rules. We allow people to have all the usual and accustomed gifts among families and friends at all holidays and weddings of the sort. There’s not a prohibition against that.”

A source said Virginia’s compliance, not the NCAA, would have communicated the message to Guy.

A link to Guy’s wedding registry was circulated online in the days after Virginia advanced to the Final Four.

Virginia has not responded to a request for comment.

On Thursday, Guy seemed surprised by what he believed had been an NCAA directive to terminate the registry he and his fiancée had established. The “Alexa Jenkins & Kyle Guy” registry at Crate & Barrel is no longer active.

“Yeah, that was crazy to me that that’s illegal because that’s what a registry’s for,” Guy said on Thursday. “The NCAA said it was illegal. I’m not going to argue with it right now. I’m gonna try to win a national championship, and then we’ll open that book.”

Emmert said NCAA officials have contacted the school to address the discrepancy.

“We’ve been reaching back out already to the university to try to find out what transpired there,” Emmert said. “That’s simply an inaccurate story.”