Prep sports: Rumors

By Ed Piper

This goes under the category of rumors, but a story that was passed on during the Canyon Crest Academy basketball event this past weekend (July 5-7) concerned the 6'10" and 7-foot brothers who played at Orange Lutheran in Orange County.

La Jolla High had games at CCA each day of the three-day "tourney" or "team camp".

However, the story being passed on had nothing to do with the Vikings, their coaching staff, or their players. The rumor wasn't passed on by any of those folks, either. It was from the coach of another program at the event.

One of the brothers supposedly played four years of high school basketball at one school, then moved to another area where he wasn't known and exhausted another four years of eligibility before finishing his eight-year high school basketball career.

This is a story, mind you, and it stretches the imagination quite a bit. But it reflects the bizarre measures that some parents and their sports-playing kids will go to, to gain an advantage or to compete in that imagination-defying world of gaining college scholarships and potential future professional opportunities.

I asked the coach, "How old was this player when he finished?" "23, maybe," he smiled. He was preoccupied at the time with counting how many players had arrived at the CCA gym to play for his team in their impending game after La Jolla's, which I was photographing and covering.

One thinks of the Robinson brothers, Tyree and Tyrell, who starred on the Lincoln state championship basketball team with Norman Powell, who now plays for the NBA champ Toronto Raptors. The Robinsons weren't said to have played eight years of high school sports, far from it. But they were "holdbacks" who were a year older than the normal age for their graduating class, a common practice among families to gain a year of growth and development for their kids.

The Robinsons went on to college football, one starring at Oregon.

We could tell you many more "student athletes" (question mark on the "student" part?) who were holdbacks--Cathedral Catholic last year had two sophomores who were 17 years old. How do you do that?

It's all legal, if you don't exceed 19 years old at some point during your senior year of eligibility.

Is the holdback phenomenon as common among girl athletes? I don't know. I'm not aware of it, although I'm sure parents, seeking to gain any advantage for their child to go on to compete in sports in college and at the professional level, have considered it.