Sign of times is a bad one for preps

Sadly, fittingly, as America's child princes chose their colleges, most compelling was the one who chose humiliation.

Kevin Hart, an ordinary offensive lineman from a tiny town in northeastern Nevada, gathered his friends and family together in Fernley High for a news conference last week to announce his college selection.

Similar gatherings have been happening since then all over America. That's how it's done today. The most personal and stressful decision in an 18-year-old's life is paraded in front of cameras, briefly turning children into celebrities and high schools into shills.

That's how Hart saw it. That's how Hart wanted it.

Playfully debating between an Oregon cap and a California cap, Hart finally stuck the Cal cap on his head and announced he would be attending Berkeley on a football scholarship.

Folks cheered. Reporters scribbled. His father cried.

Then, later, everyone gasped when it was revealed that the whole thing was a hoax.

Hart made it up. There was no scholarship offer from either team. There was no scholarship interest from any major team.

Hart felt left out, so he faked it.

"I made up what I wanted to be reality," he said later in a statement.

The reality is, the hoopla surrounding the publicized signings of football players -- culminating in Wednesday's national signing day -- is an embarrassment to a high school's mission and an exploitation of a child's psyche.

"It's taking away from the point of it all," said Lissa Gregorio, academic decathlon coach at El Camino Real High in Woodland Hills. "It's not about sports or school, it's about celebrity."

Gregorio's team of nine brilliant kids is a five-time national decathlon champion. They are celebrated around campus like any good football team, with pep rallies and marching bands and status.

Yet when one of her students agrees to attend a top university?

"They might scream it out in the middle of class while wearing the school sweat shirt," she said with a chuckle. "That's about it."

A high school principal does not hand over a gym to an engineering student who is announcing his early acceptance to Harvard.

There is no band playing for the girl with the perfect SAT score who just scored Stanford.

Would any parents of academic achievers even condone their children missing class to make such an announcement?

While I'm usually quick to blame the media, in this case we're just covering the story.

And for once, you can't blame the colleges, which are not allowed to even talk about these kids before they sign, much less orchestrate their signing shenanigans.