Ceal Barry was still brand new in her job as an athletic department administrator in September 2005. But 22 seasons as women's basketball head coach gave Barry a good enough understanding of the rules to recognize a red flag when she saw one.

It was Barry, during a conversation with a student athlete, who discovered the violations for which the University of Colorado was sanctioned by the NCAA on Thursday.

The athletic department had been undercharging non-scholarship athletes for eating at the training table for part or all of six school years from 2000-2005.

"The uncovering of it by Ceal after we had the start of a new training-table season, if you will, because we were off in the summer, was really outstanding," athletic director Mike Bohn said at a press conference at the Dal Ward Athletic Center. "And again, I think that's the type of attention to detail and professionalism that our staff has now."

Barry said she was meeting with a walk-on athlete to discuss an issue that resulted in him moving out of the CU dormitories and into off-campus housing.

The athlete had eaten at the training table the first few days of school, and Barry told him he would be reimbursed for the extra charges he had paid to eat at the training table for the rest of the semester. Walk-ons who have residence-hall meal packages can eat at the training table if they pay the difference in the cost of the training table meal and a residence-hall meal — between $6 and $8. The athlete Barry was meeting with, however, said he hadn't been charged extra to eat at the training table.

"I thought, 'I wonder why we're not charging him,'" Barry said. "So I called and asked why we weren't, and they said because we're not supposed to be. So it was totally inadvertent."

Barry called CU director of compliance Julie Manning right away to alert her that she believed they were undercharging walk-on athletes for meals. That set in motion CU's reporting the violations to the NCAA and recommending self-imposed sanctions, most of which were accepted by the NCAA.

Despite calling the infractions "limited in nature and narrow in scope," the NCAA hit CU with a $100,000 fine — nearly $40,000 more than CU recommended — along with two years' probation and the loss of three football scholarships. But Barry didn't think about how serious the consequences might be when she discovered the problem. She just knew it needed to be fixed.

"More or less, if you start thinking along those lines, it may lead you down the road of not self-reporting," Barry said. "I think you want to be committed to doing the right thing all the time and not thinking about the result."

Barry said she wasn't worried that the discovery — so soon in hers and Bohn's tenures — was an indication that there might be more such problems yet to be uncovered by the new regime.

"Having been an employee here this long, I knew there weren't," Barry said. "I knew for the most part because we do compliance reviews and rules education and take the tests.

"I didn't think I was walking into a cesspool or anything. Actually, it's just a fresh set of eyes looking at something that you do routinely for years and years, and somebody new comes in and sees it a different way."