Ineligible Player Causes El Camino to Forfeit 8 Victories : Football: Defensive back on last season’s team falsified name on transcripts and other documents. He apparently played for Compton College in 1989 and ’90.

The El Camino College football team has forfeited its eight wins from last season because it used an ineligible player, the school has announced.

The player, who was not a starter but appeared in all of the team’s games last season, falsified his name and other information on transcripts and eligibility documents, according to school officials. He had apparently played for Compton College in 1989 and 1990.

He is believed to have competed under the name Sheldon McGowan, a defensive back from Compton High. But school officials would not confirm that because of student confidentiality laws and said he might have played under an assumed name.

“He falsified his records, pure and simple,” said Mary Ann Keating, the school’s public information director. “In the checks we made after this was discovered, we saw him listed under more than one name. So we don’t even know if he was using his real name or not.”

The player joined the team two weeks before the start of last season, attended school only during the fall semester last year and did not enroll for the spring semester.

The infraction was discovered in August, when another coach from the area recognized the player’s name as a person who previously competed at Compton College.

El Camino Coach John Featherstone then notified the school’s department of physical education. After a school investigation, El Camino notified the Mission Conference and all of the teams on its 1992 schedule in early September that it had used an ineligible player.

El Camino’s wins last season were over College of the Sequoias, Fullerton, Riverside, Rancho Santiago, Orange Coast, Cerritos, Pasadena and Long Beach. The team’s final record drops from 8-3 to 0-11.

Conference commissioner T. Mark Johnson said the conference has accepted the forfeits as the proper course of action by the school and does not foresee additional penalties against El Camino.

“The school or the conference can choose to add to the penalties, but in this case the college discovered the problem and they were very good about carrying through on it,” Johnson said. “They followed the correct procedure. They used an ineligible player and they forfeited the games. It’s pretty cut and dry.”

While the penalty is cut and dry, that does not make it any easier for Featherstone to grasp.

“It’s a sad thing for our program,” Featherstone said. “I’m disappointed for the kids who were on last year’s team because we had no idea a guy like this was on the team. I just don’t want this to detract from our 1993 team in any way.”

He said it is particularly frustrating to him because of the intricate procedure the school uses to check on an athlete’s eligibility.

“If you know the way we run our tracer procedure, you would know that we thoroughly check everyone on our team,” Featherstone said. “I try to run a very clean program and I’ve always been very thorough about it. I’m just very disappointed that something like this happened.”

Featherstone said he takes full responsibility for the infraction.

“I’ll never blame our athletic department in any way,” he said. “They do a great job of tracing these kids and I’ll take any of the blame that’s coming our way on this.”

In the future, Featherstone said, the coaching staff will probably more closely scrutinize players who want to join the team before the start of the season.

“I just feel empty and frustrated because I wish I could turn back the clock,” he said. “I just wish somebody had told us about this before it got to this point.”

But Keating said that regardless of how well the school has adhered to its procedure on eligibility checks, it may have not made a difference in this case.

“There comes a time in the procedure when you have to trust what a student athlete writes on his transcripts as being true,” she said. “In this case it was not.”