A long, very interesting and of course troubling story about prep schools that are nothing more than roving basketball teams. The quickly becoming infamous, Lutheran Christian Academy in Philly, is mentioned.
Phil Jones attended Lutheran Christian Academy, an unaccredited private high school in Philadelphia where, he said, all of the students were basketball players. In his seven months there, he said, class consisted of the coach, Darryl Schofield, giving workbooks to the students to fill out. “I thought prep school was supposed to be hard,” Jones said.
In the past two years, these young men attended unusual institutions — some called prep schools, some called learning centers — where all or most of the students were highly regarded basketball players. These athletes were trying to raise their grades to compensate for poor College Board scores or trying to gain attention from major-college coaches.
An investigation by The New York Times found more than a dozen of these institutions, some of which closed soon after opening. The Times found that at least 200 players had enrolled at such places in the past 10 years and that dozens had gone on to play at N.C.A.A. Division I universities like Mississippi State, George Washington, Georgetown and Texas-El Paso.
“I would say that in my 21 years, the number of those schools has quadrupled, and I would put schools in quotation marks,” Phil Martelli, the men’s basketball coach at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, said. “They’re not all academic institutions.”
The NCAA takes hits since they set the minimum standards for schools to allow student-athlete eligibility.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association acknowledges that it has not acted as such places have proliferated. For years, its Clearinghouse has approved transcripts from these institutions without questioning them.
Until revelations last year about a diploma mill in Florida and concerns about other schools like it, the N.C.A.A. chose not to police high schools. Although the N.C.A.A. recently commissioned a task force charged with curbing academic abuse, it still faces the tricky task of separating the legitimate from the nonlegitimate schools.
The NCAA sets the standards, but doesn’t certify whether the prep schools themselves are legit. I don’t see how they can, they don’t oversee prep schools. They are, apparently, taking some steps.
Mr. Lennon, the head of the N.C.A.A task force, said it would focus first on schools like Redemption that are not under state regulation. “We’re committed to flushing out those high schools abusing the system and putting a stop to it,” he said.
One question the task force must answer: What is the maximum course load? For now, there is no rule against taking the required 14 core courses in a year. It is essentially impossible for a student at Winchendon or South Kent to take more than five core courses in a school year, the coaches there said. (Intense summer school could add one or two more.)
“If they set the limit at five, I’d be in favor of that,” Coach Chillious of South Kent said.
With the task force recommendations due June 1, Mr. Lennon issued a warning: “Any student contemplating leaving their high school right now to pick up additional courses needs to be aware the N.C.A.A. will be implementing policies. They need to make sure they are taking real courses, academic courses, and not simply trying to buy eligibility.”
But after years of not policing secondary schools, the biggest challenge for the N.C.A.A. will be determining which of the nation’s 5,000 private schools that do not fall under state regulation are exploiting the system.
Josh Centor seems to want to push the decisions, evaluations and responsibility onto the individual member organizations.
The NCAA, which is comprised of more than 1,200 member institutions, has minimum standards — set by those member institutions — that prospective student-athletes must achieve if they are going to be eligible for intercollegiate athletic competition. Just because there are minimum standards, however, doesn’t mean schools need to admit student-athletes who barely gain their eligibility. The onus falls on the member institutions to make sure they’re admitting qualified individuals each year.
That’s taking the easy way out for the NCAA on two fronts — hey, we’re just the governing body setting the standards, it’s up to the member schools to make sure the student-athletes are legit. If it is a monster task for the NCAA to look into the numerous private prep schools, how is it any easier to for individual schools to evaluate the legitimacy of each prep school?
Also, the argument that a school doesn’t have to take a barely eligible kid is naive to the competitive and financial pressures facing schools, teams and coaches. It also reduces the opportunities for the kids. Someone like Carl Krauser would have been hard pressed to get an opportunity to play, considering all he needed to do ultimately to become eligible to play at Pitt. He’s one of the success stories the NCAA and Pitt want to trumpet, but it doesn’t happen that way unless Pitt was willing to accept a student-athlete who had lower academic credentials then generally accepted.
The other risk, in trying to push it on the schools to make sure the kids can/will actually perform on the academic side by the NCAA is it generates greater pressure that a Minnesota/Clem Haskins situation arises. Where the academic support and tutoring programs get subverted into doing the academic work for the kids. If the academic issues are ignored at lower levels
I’m not saying the individual schools don’t bear a lot of responsibility as well. They do. They bear the ultimate and final responsibility — and are at the greater risk. Coaches put their jobs and careers on the line when they recruit kids from prep schools that lack anaccreditationon from state education boards, and turn a blind-eye to schools that are nothing more than storefronts. They get a rep for recruiting only for basketball and ignoring the school part. Not to mention their job dependency on the court. It’s hard to win when you lose too many recruits to academic issues.
Schools and athletic departments can see their reputation damaged for years by being represented in football and basketball by kids who are openly contemptuous of the academics.
I do have some sympathy for the spot the NCAA is in. They take some heat whenever there is any scandal for not being more proactive and not seeing the flags at a member institution sooner. They also get slammed for the micromanagement and thByzantinene rules system regulating seemingly little, minor matters.
What I suspect happens is that the NCAA ultimately goes with a rule requiring that all prep schools be state certified for a student-athletes coming from the prep school to be eligible. That pushes the onus onto the prep schools and makes it better insulates the member institutions against charges that it willfully recruited kids who were ineligible.
Sure, there will then be sad stories of kids who went to unaccredited prep schools and didn’t know it or were lied to, but at least the NCAA and member schools will look clean.
