Posted on 03/20/2019 5:39:27 PM PDT by Libloather
Lauren Isackson’s athletic credentials were dwarfed by those of her teammates. She joined the vaunted UCLA women’s soccer program in 2017 alongside members of the U.S. and Canadian national teams — elite athletes accustomed to dominating the high school and club circuits, being the best in their leagues, their states, even their entire home countries.
Isackson’s biography on the UCLA roster, meanwhile, lists her as an honorable mention all-league selection in 2014 for the West Bay Athletic League in Northern California.
But even that was false, according to federal prosecutors who have implicated Isackson’s parents in a broad conspiracy to sneak the children of wealthy and powerful families into top-flight universities they may not have been qualified to attend.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
so how was she different than a walk-on?
A Walk on is an actual competitive athlete. Most of the time not on scholarship. She never played competitive soccer in high school AFAIK.
What do you mean by that? A "walk-on"?
She is listed as a "team manager", which sounds like a bench warmer to me. Oh and something about cheering the team on during home games, but isn't that what cheerleaders do?
Yeah. Get on the field and prove it honey
No
Faking it in sports
A walk on is a student athlete at a D1 or D2 school who is not receiving athletic scholarship money and therefore has not signed what is known as a National Letter of Intent. Some walk ons make it on the team through tryouts. Many, though, are recruited in high school and promised a roster spot; there simply may not be enough scholarship money to go around. Depending on the school, the sport, the college coach, etc., these “preferred walk ons” often get a leg up in the admissions process because they are being recruited to play a sport.
I’d be embarrassed to be put on an outstanding athletic team where it would become immediately obvious that I had no talent whatsoever. I don’t know how these girls can hold their heads up.
FR is often a great place to learn new things, thanks to fellow Freepers. ;^)
One of the eye opening things I got from the University happened two months before I started.
I was a National Merit Scholar. The first from my small rural high school in Nebraska, and I caused quite the stir.
Seems a lot of parents in Omaha and Lincoln paid a lot of money to get their little darlings that tag, and some “pig farmer” from the north side of the state grabbed it without paying for the coaching, the prep, etc. Lawsuits were filed, school boards were attacked and voted out. All sorts of chaos because some kid from the hinter land managed to get a scholarship that the rest of the big schools did not get.
I went to a nice little meeting at the Iowa State University’s president’s house for all the other Merit scholars. I picked up right away that most of them were not there because of their SAT scores. It was also made VERY clear that I was not welcome in the little group and did not fit the “class of people” they expected. Seems the president wanted some big donations, and the son of a farmer did not have the resources.
Quietly digging a little deeper, I found it was something very similar to the charges being discussed. One of my mentors at school laughed and told me two things.
1. Chemical Engineers are an honor’s class by themselves.
2. A lot of people will pay for their kids to get the scholarship more than if they just paid tuition .
SO I dropped honors (good call. Not a one made it through engineering) and realized that many scholarships are basically fake.
I don’t like it. Never have. It is on the long list of things I find wrong. But little things like child sex rings, murder, and such beat out that priority. The resources spent on this case would be better severed (IMHO) else where.
My only caveat is that this is a thread to go after other people and groups that can not be attacked any other way. Trump has been making a lot of sex ring arrests, and this may be related.
Title IX makes these scams possible.
Once again, Your Federal Government at Work.
Rich people buying their kids into college is not new. To be honest it is the norm."
This is news because these cases are totally different than both the school administration and the rich parents being on the same page as far as pay for play regardless of athletic talent or scholastic aptitude. No laws are broken in those situations.
In these cases, admissions test scores were fraudulently reported, as was athletic ability.
The conspiracy between the Isackson’s and Singer is reported to have begun in 2015. Lauren wanted to go to the University of Southern California but the conspirators botched the application process; they inadvertently sent her falsified athletic history directly to regular admissions, the indictment documents show. So they switched to UCLA. Prosecutors say the fake athlete profile was handed off to a former USC women’s soccer coach, who handed it off to Salcedo who forwarded her high school transcripts and SAT scores to the UCLA women’s soccer coach, who is not named in the documents. She was accepted to the university as a “recruited” athlete.
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