It feels quaint to sit back and watch an old rerun of Friday Night Lights and see some rally girl doing Tim Riggins’ homework, or a star player finding a mysterious envelope with cash in it. But what happens when bending the rules or covering for players becomes a real life story; the infractions are so extensive and the storylines so indelicate that no TV producer would even believe it.
Bellevue High School Football Scandal; Where Are the Adults?
Bellevue High School in Bellevue, Washington is one of the most successful high school football programs in the country, with 11 state titles in 15 years, a 67-game winning streak covering some of that period and a national footprint that has had them playing on ESPN. Bellevue has also been the subject of a nearly year-long investigation by the KingCo Conference, the league governing body for high school athletics in King County. The investigation was prompted, in part, by an exposure in the Seattle Times last summer that found an underbelly of fraudulent academics, illegal recruiting and of course, money…. lots and lots of money going around.
At the crux of the scandal is a well to-do family that made their money in the trash/waste management industry. One son married a runner-up from The Bachelor TV show and became an assistant football coach at Bellevue. His older brother became vice president of the team’s booster club. Mind you, this is not the kind of booster club that has bake sales to pay for road trips. This booster club raised more than $427,000 in 2013 according to the Seattle Times investigation. That leads to what the money was used for. This isn’t a player finding $100 cash in his locker. That would be easy.
The KingCo Conference report, released earlier this week, said that while players were illegally recruited to play for Bellevue, some used false addresses to be eligible within Bellevue’s residential district. Other families allegedly acquired apartments within the school’s boundaries, with the rent being paid by boosters. More of the money went to pay for school; the kind with no real academics. According to the findings, 17 players were funneled to a for-profit private school for extra classes and academic help. The Academic Institute existed in a strip mall not far from Bellevue High. For a paltry $1,750 tuition per month, these student athletes supposedly got academic help. However, the school often had no teachers in the classrooms; little, if any homework was ever given, and the players received full class credit. And that lofty tuition bill? Discretely paid for by the booster club. Some prominent college football players are named in the report as having been cycled through The Academic Institute. And then there is the claim within the report that some of the misdeeds were not so secretive; they were just direct cash payments to families to get players to Bellevue.
The KingCo Conference has levied sanctions against the school that include four years of probation for the entire athletic department, no road games or out-of-conference games for two years, no money funneled into the program from any source for four years, no postseason play for four years and no out-of-state opponents (a big source of revenue) for four years. Head coach Butch Goncharoff has been fired. Boosters have been barred from affiliating with the program. The state high school governing body, the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association (WIAA), is looking into whether state titles need to be stripped and further sanctions imposed. If that wasn’t enough, the main boosters involved are discussing suing the conference over the penalties and coach Goncharoff says he has been set up.
Now, we cannot be completely naive. I have been watching professional and college sports for more than 40 years, and have been covering college football for Last Word on Sports for two years. I am old enough to remember corruption being the norm in the old Southwest Conference: fake jobs, hundred dollar handshakes and far, far worse. I have known athletes who have told of offers made by colleges. I am also the father of a high school varsity athlete. We hear stories about competing schools. The most successful and the private schools are usually those that get accused. Maybe there is some truth to some stories, and maybe it is just random speculation, but it is out there, usually in the private school arena.
It’s no surprise that we tend to have a lot of conversations about entitled young athletes. “Who do these kids think they are?” “What makes them think they are so deserving?” You know what? Go re-read this story, and you will have your answers. Ask yourself these questions while you scan the details: Where in the name of all that is right were the parents? How did the adults never ask how it was that their kid was taking classes in a $1,750 per month school, yet they never got a tuition bill? Or that they never had homework from that school? How did parents move into a new apartment and never pay a dime of rent and never ask how that came to be? How did parents never ask how their kid had so much walking around money?
There are no legitimate answers to those questions. The only actual answer is likely that they didn’t know and they didn’t care to know. They were outlandishly gravy training on their 17 or 18 year old kid’s football ability.
The train wreck at Bellevue may be symbolic of much that is wrong with high school and college athletics and the creation of the entitled teenager and the grotesque flow of money into amateur sports. The specifics of what happened is more symbolic of what is preposterously wrong with parents who lack the ability to teach their kids the responsibilities of being a student athlete. Mostly because they were too busy taking advantage of the whole in the system for their own benefit. And we wonder where entitled athletes come from? Really?
