Skip the Road Trips
If you are among the countless parents who give up their holiday weekends and Christmas vacations carting your kids to far off tournaments in soccer, lacrosse, basketball, tennis or hockey so that little Amanda or Derek can showcase their talents in the hope of catching the eye of the coach from UCLA or Duke and snatch that elusive scholarship, or at least admission to a top university for which they are academically unqualified, it seems you have been wasting your time. While a lucky few are granted these prizes, after all men’s lacrosse has long been affirmative action for rich white boys from private schools, a group of parents, including a few well known actresses, lawyers and fund managers, have figured out how to secure their progeny’s future by skipping the athletics part and creating fake resumes and bribing coaches at several top schools to designate their kids as athletic recruits without bothering to have them actually take the field and pay all those trainers and high powered club programs, while saving wear and tear on their cars.
Among the coaches involved are some at the very top of the academic world, including Yale and Stanford. The bribes were disguised as charitable contributions, sometimes in the millions of dollars, to bogus organizations that paid the coaches to agree to pretend that their kids were going to lead the school of choice to the heights of athletic glory. The scheme even involved having imposters take the SAT or ACT in their “student-athletes” behalf, thereby expanding the ruse to multiple levels.
At a time when somewhere in the neighborhood of 3% of overall applicants get admitted to Harvard or Columbia, and diversity at top schools continues to lag, it is a legitimate question whether athletic recruits, along with legacy applicants, should get special consideration that virtually guarantees admission over more academically qualified candidates. But at least those who have an actual talent for carrying the ball or banging aces down the center line can arguably contribute to the school’s reputation, or at least help maintain the loyalty of the aging alums who sit on their fat wallets in the stands. Thus, we perpetuate the strange marriage of academia and college sports, which serves mostly as a training ground for the NFL and NBA, while pretending to further the intellectual development of the next generation of leaders. Even the non-revenue sports are integral to the scheme, as upper class sports like tennis and lacrosse contribute to the Ivy League mystique.
But pretending to play sports to gain admission? That’s a new one. It is no surprise that famous and wealthy parents will pay any price for the privilege of putting a Stanford or USC bumper sticker on their Bentleys or Teslas. But the lack of integrity of the coaches who sold their souls for the money is truly disheartening. It makes Tony Soprano’s $50,000 gift to Columbia to ensure Meadow’s academic career look downright altruistic. But maybe it is the schools themselves that need to look themselves in the mirror. Are sports really critical to the academic purpose of a university? Maybe they can create fake teams for the fake athletic applicants to play on. Now, that is something that I would pay to watch.
