Showing them the door
Former Virginia Tech basketball coach and Virginia basketball player Ricky Stokes is in some hot water because he decided to purge players who weren't playing up to his expectations from the basketball team at East Carolina, where Stokes is now the head coach.
Stokes informed eight players recently that they did not fit into the team's future plans. Seven have transferred to other schools and one, Japhet McNeil, has declared for the NBA draft, apparently hoping no one will notice he only scored 4.3 points per game on a bad team this past season.
Stokes has the support of his athletics director, Terry Holland (who coached Stokes at UVa.), but others are saying Stokes' actions are dirty.
It's a good lesson for these young men to learn - nothing is promised to you. Athletics scholarships, like most academic scholarships, are awarded on a year-to-year basis. It's not often that they aren't renewed, but there are cases where academic scholarships were taken away when students didn't do well in the classroom.
In this case, the players didn't do well in their classroom - the basketball gym. As a result, they lost their scholarships. Case closed. Sorry it didn't work out. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
The only real problem I have is that the NCAA will still make those who transfer to Division I schools sit out a year. If the players don't make the decision to leave, then they shouldn't have to suffer if another school wants them. Kelvin Sampson isn't sitting out a year at Indiana. It only seems fair to allow these players to step on the court next year.
But do I have a problem with what Stokes did? Sure it's a bit unusual, but it's certainly no crime. And I don't even think it's unethical.
The school owes nothing else to these players. Some of them got as many as three free years of college out of the deal. Tell some 24-year-old struggling to pay back college loans that these players were mistreated.
They didn't live up to their end of the bargain, and now they're gone. You're owed nothing in life, and the sooner kids understand that the better off they'll be.
Life isn't just about showing up and working hard. That's all well and good, but at some point you have to perform. If you don't you may be asked to leave. That's what happened here.
Consider it a lesson learned the hard way.
- Patrick Hite