Recruit’s Sex Case Stops USC : Football: Andrew Carter says assistant coach told him Trojans would still give him scholarship despite no-contest plea.

Even after pleading no contest two months ago to having sex with an underage girl, Andrew Carter of Stockton believed that he would be able to enroll at USC this month on a football scholarship.

He had been told as much by USC assistant Bob Cope, Carter’s mother and attorney said.

“He assured us that Andrew wasn’t going to lose his scholarship,” Cindy Carter said.

Said attorney Robert Wright: “He told me everything would be fine, as long as (Carter) wasn’t convicted of some heinous felony.”

But USC said last week that Carter, a 6-foot-1, 175-pound defensive back who signed a letter of intent with the Trojans last winter, had not been admitted to school.

Wright said he and the Carters were misled by Cope, but Cope, who coaches USC’s defensive backs, denied making promises to the Carters.

“What I assured them was, if it wasn’t a serious incident, I didn’t see where that would be a problem,” Cope said. “But I’m not in a position to make assurances on (admission to school).

“I was trying to reassure him that we were going to support him. . . . Whether that’s interpreted that I assured them, I don’t know. That’s a matter of verbage.

“But to say that I could promise (what) was going to happen . . .

“I’ve been coaching for 31 years and I know that assistant football coaches don’t have the final say on things like that.”

Cope said the decision to deny admission to Carter was made at an administrative level, adding that Athletic Director Mike McGee probably could provide the reasons and the thinking behind it.

McGee declined comment.

USC Coach Larry Smith also said no guarantees were made to Carter after Carter was arraigned in April.

“Our process, any time something like this comes up, is to let the courts process it, and then we act after we hear what the courts decide,” Smith said. “We acted after we got all the facts. That’s when we made our decision.”

Carter, 18, was given a six-month jail term by Stockton Municipal Judge Anthony P. Lucaccini on June 9, after pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges of having sex with a 15-year-old classmate at Lincoln High.

Lucaccini stayed the jail term, imposing three years’ supervised probation on condition that Carter spend 30 days in jail, perform 100 hours of community service and attend sex-offender counseling.

A few days later, Carter was told that he would not be given a scholarship to USC.

Wright said he advised Carter to enter a plea of no contest based on his belief, after talking with Cope, that Carter would not lose his scholarship if he was convicted of a misdemeanor charge.

“As soon as they told me his scholarship would be honored, I decided to settle the case because it was in (Carter’s) best interests at the time,” Wright said.

“Had it not been that way, I would have continued to press for a not-guilty finding and force the girl to trial, so that she’d have to come in to testify.

“Quite possibly, something could have changed at that point. . . . She might not have wanted to come in to testify. They might have had it thrown up in their face that they stood a chance of losing the case and they might have dropped it.”

Wright suggested to the Carters that they sue USC, “but it appeared more expedient for Andrew just to get into (another) college than to go after (the Trojans) for breaching their agreement,” he said.

Carter has since accepted a scholarship at Northern Arizona.