The NCAA yesterday placed the University of New Hampshire hockey team on two years probation, and hit it with multiple recruiting restrictions, after an associate head coach said he misunderstood a program used to e-mail prospects and sent 923 impermissible notes to potential student-athletes.

The violations were committed during the 2007-08 season, discovered a couple of weeks after the end of that campaign, and self-reported by UNH to the NCAA's Committee on Infractions after an internal investigation that revealed the error the coach had mistakenly made while using a computer program designed to contact multiple recruits with a single keystroke.

The software, called Scoutware, was not a problem in itself. However, when plugging a player's information into the program, the coach said he accidentally entered the year each student-athlete was expected to enroll at the university - instead of the year each was expected to graduate high school. (In hockey circles, where players often play at prep schools or in junior leagues, the end of high school and the start of college don't often occur in the same year.)

As a result, four freshmen and 26 sophomores were targeted in e-mail blasts meant really for just juniors and seniors. In total, those 30 student-athletes received 923 e-mails, all of which violated NCAA bylaw 13.4.1, which disallows a school from making contact "prior to the June 15th following the conclusion of the prospects' freshman or sophomore years in high school." The NCAA had changed that rule to ban recruiting sophomores a year earlier.

While the violation is considered "major" because of the volume of e-mails sent, UNH did not lose any scholarships in the sanctioning, nor was it forced to forfeit any previous games. And it remains fully eligible for postseason play.

The associate head coach - the report does not say whether it was David Lassonde or Scott Borek, both of whom hold the title at UNH - contacted the school's compliance officer on April 8, 2008, and by February 2009 the school's findings had been sent to the NCAA's Committee on Infractions. That board reviewed and reached its ruling this past April, then released its report yesterday.

"We realized we made a mistake," UNH Head Coach Dick Umile said in a phone interview last night. "We realized we had sent some e-mails through our Scoutware program to sophomores, and self-reported it to our compliance officer, Carrie Doyle."

In its report to the NCAA, UNH said it reduced the associate head coach's financial compensation for the '08-'09 fiscal year, and also revoked the bonus he was due for the team's success during the '07-'08 season.

The university also issued, and the NCAA approved, three self-imposed penalties on the hockey program as a whole: It placed the team on two years probation, which began on April 24 of this year; it barred the 30 students who received the illegal e-mails from receiving expense-paid visits to the university; and it disallowed those same prospects from signing a National Letter of Intent with the Wildcats.

Those 30 players can still attend UNH, and can still play hockey - but the team must now lure them to Durham without being able to host them for official visits, or lock them into scholarships with the legally binding letter.

Additionally, the NCAA imposed two more penalties to those proposed by UNH itself, both of which are already being served. The first is public reprimand and censure, which was effectively taken care of by releasing the report yesterday. And the second is a reduction in the number of recruiters who can be off-campus during a six-month stretch. Between April 24 and Oct. 23, UNH's recruiting efforts will be limited to one coach on the road at any given time.

Umile said he wasn't going to blame the incident entirely on the hazards of recruiting with new technology, though the software was a new tool - and it was a misinterpretation in its use that led to trouble.

"We made a mistake," the head coach said.