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Former men’s tennis coaches at the University of Southern Mississippi (unsuccessfully) bribed a highly recruited player to stay on the team with $5,000 and a car, paid another athlete $150 to write an academic paper for him, and offered him $200 to come back and win an in-progress match, according to a National Collegiate Athletic Association public infractions report. The NCAA announced Wednesday that it had cited the former head and assistant coach with unethical conduct and the university with a failure to monitor its men’s tennis program. The report also noted that the coaches’ refusal to participate in NCAA enforcement interviews and their encouragement of athletes to lie to NCAA investigators.
“The two coaches’ actions obviously fell short of what the NCAA membership expects of its coaches by their failure to act ethically,” Rod Uphoff, acting chair of the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions and law professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia, said in a call with reporters Wednesday, adding that they also were "ruining" the "opportunities” of the athletes involved, who are now permanently ineligible.
In explaining the university's failure to monitor citation, the report notes a flouting of travel policies and procedures, lack of proper documentation and general administrative oversight of the tennis program, and failure to provide appropriate resources to compliance staff. Also, obviously, the coaches' behavior occurred under supposed administrative watch. The violations took place from January 2008 through May 2010.
Citations include public reprimand and censure; four years’ probation (through Jan. 29, 2017); a seven-year show-cause order for the former head coach and a six-year show-cause order for the former assistant coach, which will require any institution that wants to hire those coaches within that time frame to make its case for doing so to the NCAA; prohibition of foreign tour participation for men’s tennis until 2016; and a one-year postseason ban for men’s tennis, as well as vacation of all wins in which the former athletes competed while ineligible (both self-imposed by the university).
