A Player Rises Through the Cracks

But Hamilton said lapses in attendance and missed practices prevented Williams, then 6 feet 6 and only 155 pounds, from being more than a reserve on Franklin teams that won Philadelphia Public League boys' championships.

Hamilton said he refused to give Williams a 1999-2000 championship ring because he was the first player in his 28 years of coaching who didn't graduate with his class.

Without a diploma and with his public school eligibility expired, Williams called Philadelphia Christian Academy, which Tonya and Jesse Edwards, a Pentecostal minister from Jackson, Tenn., opened in 1980 to educate their children and then expanded.

Tonya Edwards said she did not hear from Williams again until he and 15 other players showed up at PCA in the fall of 2000 with Darryl Schofield.

In 1999, Jesse Edwards hired Schofield as athletic director and basketball coach. Schofield, a former Philadelphia sanitation worker, was an AAU coach in the city. It isn't clear how he met Williams, but Schofield would become a key figure in Williams's life.

All of the players Schofield brought to PCA, including some from Belgium and France, arrived lacking the necessary grade-point average and standardized test scores to become academically eligible to play basketball under the NCAA's rules.

Schofield quickly built a strong team that finished 27-6, but Jesse Edwards said he was unhappy with how the players performed academically.

"As far as basketball, I'd say Schofield is top-notch," Edwards said. "He got the best players in the city. The problem was how he did it. The players didn't go to school. They didn't show up. When they did show up, they were late or disruptive in class. Most of them couldn't read on a third-grade level. Academics were the least important part of his program."

Tonya Edwards said Schofield registered PCA with the Clearinghouse, a fairly simple process: Schools submit a list of the classes they offer. The Clearinghouse then approves or disallows courses based on the school's responses to its questions about the curriculum, Lennon said. Athletes pay a $50 fee to register at the Clearinghouse. Their grades are submitted by their high schools and compared to the list of approved classes on file. If the two match and the grades are adequate, a transcript is certified.

Tonya Edwards said she was surprised to learn that the Clearinghouse approved PCA to teach 35 classes, including Greek I and Greek II, which the school has never offered.

"We didn't have people qualified to teach some of those subjects," she said.

Schofield did not return phone messages this week to discuss courses that school officials said he registered at Clearinghouse.