GU Basketball Player Attended Targeted School By Alex Schank Hoya Staff Writer Tuesday, May 2, 2006
The NCAA approved several new guidelines Thursday in an effort to close a loophole that some believe has allowed certain academically unqualified high school athletes, including a Georgetown basketball player, to participate in collegiate sports.
In recent months, some news sources from around the country have reported that some small preparatory high schools are inflating their students’ grades so that the students can meet NCAA standards and matriculate at major universities.
The new measures passed by the NCAA’s board of directors, which will take effect this fall, permit NCAA officials to visit high schools suspected of academic fraud. The new rules also require schools to submit the academic records “of high school students who make dramatic academic improvements in a short amount of time or graduate from high schools with questionable academic profiles,” according to an NCAA press release.
Georgetown men’s basketball forward Marc Egerson (COL ’09) is among the dozens of students nationwide that NCAA officials believe attended these high schools and now play for college sports teams, according to a report printed February in The Washington Post.
Last year, Egerson played basketball for Lutheran Christian, a small preparatory school in Philadelphia, Pa., after not graduating the year before from Glasgow High School in Newark, Del., according to The Washington Post. Lutheran Christian, the subject of an in-depth Post feature in March, has sent its graduates to several universities to play basketball, including George Washington, ississippi State, Temple and Georgetown.
The Georgetown basketball Web site, maintained by the athletic department, currently lists Egerson’s high school as Glasgow, despite the fact that Egerson reportedly did not graduate from Glasgow and most recently attended Lutheran Christian.
“I’m sure what we have listed on the Web site is correct,” Bill Shapland, Georgetown’s senior sports communications director, said.
Egerson could not be reached for comment.
Shapland said that the university will “follow the NCAA rules as we have throughout the history of the organization.”
He declined to comment further on Egerson or Lutheran Christian.
Schools suspected of rigging their student-athletes’ grades gained national attention last December, when the New York Times investigated a Miami high school where the grade point averages of football players had allegedly risen substantially.
NCAA President Myles Brand created a 23-member group to examine the alleged instances of fraud occurring at prep high schools across the nation, especially schools where little in-class instruction took place, yet students were graduating with high grades. The NCAA is still considering other measures that might be implemented in the future to curb the ability of these schools to set their students’ GPAs artificially high and thereby cheat the NCAA’s academic requirements.
Shapland said that Georgetown’s recruitment process for sports teams “varies from coach to coach.”
He added that high schools that “have seen kids go on to succeed at Georgetown are interested in having more of their students attend a prestigious university and probably encourage them that way.”
