Prep School?!

[Economics_Nerd82]

All this talk about Mike Ford and Noel Devine has me a tad bit confused. What is a "prep school?" It sounds like to me it's a place where players go where they can gain grade eligibility. Although, in some cases it sounds like it's a place where a player can get added playing time before they play college ball. Can someone correct me?

[AndytheBull]

I'm not really sure exactly, but I believe its a stop to get eligible for college. I'm not sure how they decide, some players defer enrollment until January, while working on test scores on their own, so I guess its more for grade issues than test scores. Also, I think its for people that might be closer academically than some, b/c apparently you have four years of eligibility out of prep school as opposed to going to a JUCO and it counting towards eligibility.

The best example(I think) is Larry Fitzgerald a few years ago. He went pro after his true sophomore season, but he appealed to go early b/c he spent one year at a prep school. I'm sure somebody else has a better explanation, but thats my understanding of it.

[E.T.]

Military Academy

http://www.hargrave.edu/

[Economics_Nerd82]

Military Academy

http://www.hargrave.edu/

Does that mean he was prepping to join the military?

[E.T.]

Nope, just a "prep" school, some are "military" . . . I don't know enough about them to really try to educate.

Here's a recent article:

Fighting the ‘Prep School’ Scandal

Published: December 17, 2006

Insiders have long whispered among themselves about bogus “prep schools†where barely literate high school athletes launder their transcripts by taking pablum courses and sometimes by taking no courses at all. The athletes then go on to big-time sports universities, where they fail or exhaust their playing years before landing back on the streets without job prospects or college degrees.

The prep school scheme was meant to circumvent academic qualification rules for college athletes laid out years ago by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The N.C.A.A., which was slow to recognize the seriousness of the problem, has finally adopted policies to root it out. But those policies will not do the job unless the organization takes a hard-line approach with everyone involved, including powerhouse prep schools with friends in high places and college athletics departments that knowingly recruit students who do not meet academic guidelines.

The prep school scheme sends a dangerous message to poor neighborhoods, where young people too often ignore their studies, believing that they will magically become millionaires once the world sees their athletic talents. Even worse, it encourages students to drop out of legitimate schools before graduation  at which point their grade-point averages would be written in stone  to sign up with fake schools that can help them rewrite their academic records.

The N.C.A.A. has begun to scrutinize nontraditional schools for their academic programs and has actually decertified some. The organization has also stepped up its review of athletes’ transcripts and will pay special attention to athletes who attended several schools, showed sudden and implausible jumps in grade-point average, transferred to another school late in the senior year or took an implausible number of courses in one semester.

These measures are encouraging as far as they go. But the N.C.A.A. will need to wade much deeper into the problem if it hopes to break this scheme. For starters, it needs to make clear not just what courses high school athletes need to take to become eligible for college sports, but when they should take them. Until that happens, those who exploit young athletes will always be tempted to counterfeit the academic record at the last possible moment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/opinion/17sun2.html?ex=1167627600&en=09607b63c4c30d06&ei=5070

[TKBlue]

That article is a one sided view on Prep schools. Prep schools are short for college preparatory schools and are essentially schools that are post high school for generally a year (although most prep schools are actually part of a boarding high school. Many, many prep schools exist to improve academics and many high achieving students use prep schools to improve academics to get into Ivy League level schools. HOWEVER, post high school prep schools can also be used for kids who need to improve their academics to get into college, AND many prep schools have highly competitive sports programs, thereby a convergence of goals create environments where lower achieving academic kids with high quality athletics use the prep schools essentially as a year of remediation. Also, many prep schools are military in nature. In my book if they are legit, and most are, this is just another avenue for a kid to get his academics together in order to go to college.

[E.T.]

The articel was slanted as the negative, as the title showed, it was just the first article I found to explain a little better, but your post did that  8-)