Buyer Beware
IMG Academy’s success has tempted aspiring coaches and educators, some with little or no experience, to jump into the field—and sometimes perpetrate scams. On August 29, 2021, IMG Academy’s top football program lined up against Bishop Sycamore, a relatively new school from Ohio, for a game that would shine a spotlight on fraud and negligence in sports-focused schools.
“If you think of an academy’s academic rigor as a sliding scale and IMG Academy is somewhere near 100,” says Ben Ferree, co-author of Friday Night Lies: The Bishop Sycamore Story, “then Bishop Sycamore is at zero. They had no academics.”
Ferree spent nearly eight years as the assistant director of officiating and sport management at the Ohio High School Athletic Association. In that capacity he led an investigation into Bishop Sycamore and its football coach, Roy Johnson. In 2018, a school run by Johnson called Christians of Faith from Columbus, Ohio, started showing up on other high schools’ football schedules. Ferree had never heard of it, so he called the school and was told it had 750 students. Ferree went to the listed address and there were no students and no school.
The OHSAA declared COF was not a real school and soon the Ohio State Department of Education revoked its charter. But the following year, Johnson successfully formed Bishop Sycamore. The football team went 4–5 in 2019 and managed to stay under the radar. Then, according to Ferree, the Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity for Johnson. Legitimate football teams could not find enough open schools to schedule, and Bishop Sycamore filled the vacuum.
One former student told Complex.com that Bishop Sycamore recruiters promised him the school would become the “IMG of the Midwest.” Instead, students stayed in hotel rooms or apartments and were forced to steal food from Walmart and grocery stores. Their only academic experience was one visit to a public library. They played multiple games a week with little medical supervision, and the school couldn’t maintain adequate staffing to run the program.
Bishop Sycamore went 0–6 in 2020, but somehow Johnson was able to convince ESPN its talent was on par with elite programs and get the network to air its 2021 game against IMG Academy. Anyone watching could see the two teams did not belong on the same field. IMG Academy won 58–0, prompting a social media outcry of concern for the Bishop Sycamore players’ wellbeing. The state quickly investigated and decided the school was a “scam.” Governor Mike DeWine declared: “Ohio families should be able to count on the fact that our schools educate students and don’t exist in name only as a vehicle to play high school sports.”
Multiple media outlets pursued the Bishop Sycamore story and later that fall HBO announced that NFL Hall of Famer Michael Strahan’s company would produce a documentary, which became 2023’s BS High. The NCAA had been investigating “diploma mills”—high schools with fraudulent academic programs—for nearly two decades. But Bishop Sycamore’s loss to IMG Academy showed how far some schools would go in taking advantage of aspiring athletes.
Ferree hoped the Bishop Sycamore fiasco would usher in a new era of oversight, but that did not happen. “When the Bishop Sycamore fraud finally went mainstream, there were a lot of steps that I initially thought would be positive,” he says. In December 2021 the Ohio Department of Education released a report on its investigation of Bishop Sycamore, recommending seven measures for the regulation of non-chartered, non-tax-supported schools. None of the measures have been implemented by the state legislature. The state education department has little leverage when there’s no charter to revoke and no funding to be blocked.
“Ohio law remains unchanged,” Ferree says. “There’s nothing preventing this sort of thing from happening again. If you wanted to start a non-chartered non-tax-supported school in the state of Ohio, you can still do so with zero oversight from the Ohio Department of Education.”
NCAA director of high school review Sarah Overpeck heads a group that ensures high schools meet the association’s academic standards: To be eligible to play their sport as college freshmen at a Division 1 institution, high school athletes must complete 16 core courses with a minimum GPA of 2.3 in those courses. Overpeck says her team, which consists of seven full-time employees, evaluates “about 400” new schools a year and has an online portal anyone can access to see whether a high school is in good standing.
“If there are oddities,” Overpeck says, “like the requirements for students are so strange that you think this doesn’t seem like school, then you might want to look it up on the eligibility center website. We make room for a lot of varying models. There’s plenty of space for innovation and asynchronous learning. But if [a parent] is like, ‘Wow, my student doesn’t have to contact their teacher more than once a semester,’ they might want to double-check the site to make sure they’re a cleared school.”
Ferree believes that his home state, Ohio, is hesitant to investigate non-chartered, non-tax-supported schools because public officials do not want to interfere with ultra-religious schools. The State Board of Education’s Ohio Administrative Code allows “schools with truly held religious beliefs to be established without a charter from the State Board of Education.”
Ferree says that tracking the less-reputable sports academies can be difficult because the operators often move quickly from one school name to another.
But he acknowledges that Bishop Sycamore was exceptional. “The reason this became so big and so national,” Ferree says, “is because they did such a bad job. Football is hard. You need a lot of equipment. You want to actually run a scam like this, do it in basketball.”
Corey Heitz runs Prep Athletics, a placement service for high school basketball players. “Right now, we could start a basketball academy,” Heitz says. “All we would need is a van, a house, and a gym. There’s no accreditation. You don’t have to build the infrastructure that a brick-and-mortar prep school would. There’s a very low barrier to entry.”
Heitz believes the number of sports academies trying to attract students has grown since the pandemic. “During Covid, a lot of the prep schools—typically boarding schools—were so successful because they created their own bubbles and could play other prep schools,” Heitz says. “A lot of private schools and public schools were shut down. So the demand went up for prep schools, but there’s only a limited amount of roster spots. The demand grew faster than the supply. These academies, specifically for basketball, started popping up all over the country.”
Heitz says that he will not place an athlete at a new sports academy unless he has seen it operate successfully for at least a few years. “A simple event can shut these things down overnight,” Heitz says. “Every single year in November, families reach out to me to say we just spent $20,000 for this academy. It just shut down. The coach is gone. Can you help us?
“A financier could walk away,” Heitz continues. “Or it could be like Kanye [West’s Donda Academy] and after one anti-Semitic rant, everyone left the basketball team.” (Donda, which collapsed in 2022, was in part known for its elite basketball program but did not follow the typical sports academy model of four hours of academics and four hours of athletics per day.) “You have guardrails in place at a brick-and-mortar prep school that you just don’t have at those academies.”
Villanova sociology professor Rick Eckstein, a critic of the commercialization of youth sports, believes the financial incentives of excelling at sports create opportunities for bad actors. “When you have customers who are in a lot of ways blind to what’s going on,” Eckstein said, “and are just so obsessed with getting their kids and their own families to that so-called next level, they miss things. They ignore things that are right in front of their noses.”
