Last August, Bishop Sycamore High School of Ohio played a made-for-TV football game against Florida-based powerhouse IMG Academy. Bishop Sycamore was touted as one of the best high school football teams in the state of Ohio, which is why ESPN set the game up.
Bishop Sycamore lost 58-0, leaving many questions about the school and its athletic and academic records. What a state of Ohio education department investigation found is pretty shocking.
The state found no evidence that Bishop Sycamore enrolled multiple students this year and concluded it didn’t meet minimum standards, including for academic offerings and student safety, according to the ODE investigation launched after the team’s televised 58-0 loss to Florida-based powerhouse IMG Academy in August.
Bishop Sycamore’s report filed with the department for this school year listed only one enrolled student and stated its physical address as a home in a residential neighborhood.
Bishop Sycamore administrator Andre Peterson claims his program is designed to get more exposure for high school players finding it difficult to get into colleges. In truth, the school, originally known as Christians of Faith, lied to recruits who lived in the tough neighborhoods of the nation’s gritty industrial cities about academic help and football glory. Now, according to the New York Times, the kids are right back where they started.
Almost overnight, Bishop Sycamore became shorthand for sports factories that cynically masquerade as schools to produce elite, made-for-TV athletes. This case happened to be more egregious because of the lopsided score and because Christians of Faith’s dubious academics had been exposed before it resurfaced under a new name and showed up on ESPN.
“Unfortunately,” the Ohio Department of Education said in report released on Friday, “the facts suggest that Bishop Sycamore High School was and is, in fact, a scam.”
Isiah Miller’s story is instructive. Recruited from the Bronx after he had graduated from high school, he was promised first-class accommodations and a first-class football program.
That’s not what he got — not even close.
But his new prep school, Christians of Faith Academy, didn’t prioritize education, though students went on a paintball outing the coach insisted would count for credit. And it lacked stable accommodations: The team got kicked out of at least two hotels, and for a while the players were wedged into a coach’s girlfriend’s house, with one shower for 40 boys, most of them in their late teens.
The school didn’t get much attention until this August, when it played a televised game against IMG Academy and made a splash on ESPN for all the wrong reasons.
The 58-0 beat-down by IMG even had the announcers wondering if the game should be stopped out of fear that the Bishop Sycamore players could get hurt.
Related: It’s Time for Clean Old-Fashioned Hate!
It’s a relatively new phenomenon: “non-chartered” schools popping up all over the country catering to the dreams of athletes, musicians, and others who are offered a “back door” to success. Instead, it’s a trap door to a scam.
It identified itself to the ODE as a “non-chartered, non-tax-supported school,” a category that is largely outside of the department’s oversight and that allows for bypassing certain typical systems of operation because of “truly held religious beliefs.” But the department said it couldn’t determine whether Bishop Sycamore had such beliefs.
There are apparently three thousand of these schools across the country: non-chartered, non-tax-supported private schools that evade scrutiny by state boards. The owner of Bishop Sycamore/Christians of Faith pocketed $20 million from the scam — not bad for 3 years’ work. But it’s the school’s shattering of the dreams of student-athletes looking for a way into college that’s the real crime here.