A friend of mine I coached baseball with was the C-team (7th & 8th grade) head football coach for his school as well. He likes to talk about the team they played in a home & home series. The first year was at his place and his kids walked the dog on them so bad they had a running clock the entire second half. The next year when they went to play them there he said he got worried when most of the other team drove themselves to the game.

When my oldest son was playing 11u rec league football the county suspended one of the organizations for playing kids sometimes 4 years older than the age limit. They got caught when one of the coaches of a team they had just beat recognized one of their players as the son of one of his employees who was the same age as his older son. He reported it to the county recreation folks and they investigated. They didn't use the ringers in every game....just the games against the better teams. When the organization board admitted to it they banned every single one of them and all of their coaches and put the organization on probation for five years. For some reason the next few years that organization wasn't very good.

(04-24-2016 07:25 PM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  

(04-22-2016 12:23 PM)SuperFlyBCat Wrote:  

(04-22-2016 12:07 PM)ivet Wrote:  I dont get it...he was able to go to Canada under the Immigration Protection Act obviously by using fake documents. The coach just happened to sponsor him.

Let me preface by saying I attended public school in California so why is this funny? Was this funny because he was tall and can play basketball and his sponsor just happened to work for a private school?

This happened here in the U.S. and that kid went to public school.

Samarin has already enrolled as a freshman at John Harris High School, where he distinguished himself as a star student. He maintained a 4.16 grade point average, was a member of the National Honor Society and a lieutenant in the Navy Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps. He was also enrolled as a student at Harrisburg University.

I guess this story isn't as funny because this kid-I mean man, wasn't on the basketball team.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/29/americas/p...interview/

Catholic HS's have always been creative in their recruiting. This one went a little further I guess. You could the same for other private schools.

My Grandpa played college football when he was in HS, got paid.
Then full ride to Tulane, and never went to class. Was there for 4 years.

It's not just Catholic schools. Do you really think that North College Hill (a tiny public high school with no basketball history) didn't pay OJ Mayo and Bill Walker when they moved out of West Virginia?

The HS did not, maybe someone connected to the HS. What AAU team did they play for?

(04-24-2016 09:57 PM)dxdtdemon Wrote:  

(04-24-2016 07:46 PM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  This reminds me of Dayton Christian.

The longest story I could find online about this was here: https://harpers.org/archive/2015/04/american-hustle/6/

But I remember the story well. Dayton Christian recruited a bunch of athletes from the Central African Republic in the late 90s-early 00s. Everyone thought it was aboveboard, and even noble. My high school (a Catholic school that didn't recruit - I knew every player on the team from when they were 10) played them in the state tourney my junior year, 2000. Dayton Christian had a young man named Romain Sato who was as pure a natural talent as I've ever seen, as well 1-2 other immigrant Africans. Sato goaltended 3 shots, but the refs had never seen goaltending before in D-2 so we ended up losing in overtime. My school's coach complained to the paper about the refs and he ended up getting fired over the incident. A darn shame because he was such a good coach that he managed to win big against the state's best D-1 schools (many of whom were in our conference) even though we were a 99.5% white school that didn't recruit.

2-3 years later, Dayton Christian got busted and most of the immigrants got deported. But Sato was playing for Xavier University, where he was made several Freshman All-American teams after averaging 11 pts & 5 rebounds. He *somehow* managed to be the only CAF immigrant not deported in the scandal. Sato never fully developed his potential and was never Xavier's best player, but he was such a natural talent he ended up getting drafted by the Spurs in 2004. But he never played in the NBA. He's currently playing in Europe.

For some reason, I hadn't heard about this despite being in high school in that area at that time, and while not playing basketball, I was a pretty big fan. I take it that you played in the battle of Dayton-Xenia Rd. (or I guess you guys called it the battle of Linden Ave.).

Nope. I was at a co-ed Catholic high school in Cincinnati. The only time we played them was in the state tourney.

Here's the article where our coach got canned:

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2000/04...erger.html

The students held a sit-in to support him and he ended up keeping his job. But only for a few more years because the diocese was against him (they had just taken over the school from the nuns who used to run it so they wanted to make it clear that they weren't going to tolerate that sort of behavior from our coaches. I definitely see where they were coming from). My high school was crazy for basketball - we had 70 guys try out for the freshman team out of a class of 210 people.