Freshman guard Nimrod Tishman will be able to participate with the team when the Gators officially begin practice on Friday, but he has not yet been declared eligible to play by the NCAA Clearinghouse.

Florida coach Billy Donovan said Tishman, who is from Tel Aviv, Israel, was such a late addition to the team, and because the process of clearing students from overseas is so complicated, it has taken longer to obtain NCAA clearance. Donovan said nothing so far in the correspondence between Florida and the NCAA has led him to believe that Tishman will not eventually be cleared to play, and that he expects that decision to be handed down before the regular season begins.

"There's a series of checklists the NCAA has to go through to make sure he's cleared and eligible to play,'' Donovan said. "He's cleared to practice, but if we were to play tomorrow, he would not be cleared to play.So I think it's a process that our school has to go through, and when that process gets done, it's probably really more in the NCAA 's hands. . . On the preliminary phone calls they have made to this point and time, there's nothing that has come back to us right now that has created concern or alarm that he would be declared ineligible to play.