athletics

This is somewhat of a continuation on my previous post about March Madness.

I was watching a TV special while I was on the mainland that investigated "made-up" prep schools on the mainland, mostly in Florida. Apparently, it's really easy to start a school in Florida as long as you have money. They mentioned something like all you had to do was fill out an application on the internet and have $500,000 or so.

Once these schools became "official," they were put into a certain league for athletics. Then, these schools began recruiting basketball players. They got a lot of attention for their success in the athletics field. These "fake" prep schools were very successful in the national and/or regional level. The players were then recruited my Division I college teams and were already being followed by NBA scouts.

These schools claimed to have rigorous academic programs, but didn't. A majority of the students received A's for doing very little work. The NCAA has a policy where if you have a certain GPA, you need a certain SAT score to be eligible to play, the higher your GPA, the lower your SAT score that you need. These basketball players then needed something like an 800 (math and reading combined) to be eligible for Division I basketball.

After these schools would win a championship, they would then shut down, never heard from again. When I saw this program, I was in disbelief. How can the state of Florida actually allow schools like this to exist. It's almost as if the Florida government could care less about moral incorrectness of these schools and are solely promoting basketball. You could argue that these schools are getting these athletes recognized in a field that they wouldn't've been recognized in if they had attended a public school. However, I feel that if the athlete wanted to pursue basketball in college or on the professional level, they are going to have to work hard to play in those opportunities, why shouldn't they have to work hard on the high school level. I'm just amazed at how our lives revolve around sports in general. Every state wants the recognition of "the most NCAA Div. I Basketball players" or "the most NBA players", etc. In a way, these teenagers are being used to promote the state of Florida.