New NCAA Rule Will Help Junior Colleges

"All of a sudden, instead of people trying to place players with you, you now had to go out and try to really recruit against Division I schools who were trying to put a kid in a prep school," said Paul Swanson, the coach at Pensacola (Fla.) Junior College.

For the four-year school, "if you can put someone somewhere for one year and get him back for four, it was a simple business decision. You knew which [prep] schools were legit and which were not, so not only was it hurting you, it was hurting the young man."

A decade ago, coaches said, the best junior college teams in the Midwest usually had five players who could play for major Division I programs. In recent years, the better teams usually had two players of that caliber. Wabash Valley (Ill.) College Coach Dan Sparks, who coached Marion in junior college, said close to 100 college coaches used to attend the national tournament each year. That number, he said, has been cut in half.

Paul Swanson and others said the emergence of fraudulent prep schools was a major topic at recent summer meetings for junior college coaches.

Junior college coaches had watched the practice become "progressively worse," he said, and "suddenly they were popping up everywhere."

In a response to the trend, he submitted a proposal two years ago to the NABC that detailed how players would be able to stay at a junior college one year to repair their academic deficiencies before being eligible at a Division I school.

Ryan Swanson added: "I have seen the transcripts. Kids with a 1.0 for 3 1/2 years go to some place and get a 4.0. That used to bother me, kids having this perception that prep school was some fantasy where you went and automatically became eligible."

The Washington Post reported in February 2006 that Lutheran Christian Academy in Philadelphia, which sent players to Georgetown and George Washington among other programs, was operated out of a community center, had no textbooks and had only one full-time employee, a former sanitation worker with no college degree. The New York Times reported in November 2005 that University High, a correspondence school in Miami, offered diplomas to students despite having no classes or instructors.

"We saw the NCAA not doing anything yet to legislate or police some of the prep schools that we knew were not doing the right things," Ryan Swanson said. "We were upset that the system rewarded kids for dropping out of school. We were upset because we felt the NCAA viewed us as the ugly, red-headed stepchild."

Coaches don't know if junior college basketball will return to the level of 15 years ago, but they expect more talent to be spread across the country and for it to have added relevance on the national recruiting scene.

"I think it may come back," Kidder said, "and it's not because people want it to come back. It's because the NCAA has made it that much more difficult for these guys, with this rule closing up all these sweatshop places."