No Heroes in Cotton’s Sad Story

How did it get to this? How could a 19-year-old have his best days behind him, his present in turmoil and his future in doubt?

Three years ago Schea Cotton was a dominant figure on the basketball landscape, a can’t-miss prospect who could have gone to any of the top college programs in the country. As it stands now, his lawyer said this week, Cotton can’t play at any four-year school.

A toxic waste dump sits where flowers used to grow.

You could gather all of the involved parties and probably find enough blame to dish out to everyone at the table. The bottom line is Cotton’s career lies in a perilous state and could be over before it really gets started.

This shouldn’t be happening to Cotton, who was 6-5, 215 pounds and the subject of a Sports Illustrated feature at 16. This shouldn’t be happening to the kid who, after transferring from Bellflower St. John Bosco to Mater Dei as a freshman, won a state championship and player of the year honors as a sophomore.

“You’d look at him, you’d go, ‘What’s the next two years going to bring?’ ” Mater Dei Coach Gary McKnight said.

The future seemed to be laden with nothing but good things, more trophies and bags full of letters from salivating college coaches.

Instead, the next two years brought only 11 games, none in his senior year. The next two years brought injuries and another transfer, back to St. John Bosco. This year brought another change of heart, with Cotton backing out of a letter of intent to play for Long Beach State and signing with UCLA. This year brought an NCAA investigation into the financing of his new car and what role a local youth coach might have played.

Those investigations yielded no evidence of wrongdoing and just when it seemed Cotton was in the clear and ready to make good on some of that potential, the NCAA rocked him with the news that it had voided the results of his June 11 Scholastic Assessment Test and declared him academically ineligible to play at UCLA.

If you want to look for villains in this story, look no further than the NCAA. The bureaucrats clearly smelled something wrong with Cotton and wanted to get him no matter what. They couldn’t get him on the car, so they got him on the SAT.

The NCAA says Cotton should not have received special circumstances--namely extra time and larger print on the question forms--when he took the SAT, even though the Education Testing Service seemed to have no problems with the Cotton family’s claim that Schea suffers from anxiety when he takes tests. The NCAA trusts the ETS to produce a valid test that helps determine whether thousands of players are eligible, but can’t take ETS’s word that Cotton deserved special accommodations. That’s the type of hypocrisy that makes the NCAA such a mind-boggling institution.

What the NCAA needs to do is take a stronger look at its flawed Initial Eligibility Clearinghouse, which takes forever to process information and in this case did not produce a ruling on Cotton until the week before classes started at UCLA.

Now, with school in session and practice set to begin Oct. 15, Cotton’s decision-making time is almost up and the NCAA seems to be in no rush to reply to his request for a reversal. When it comes to the NCAA, the best solution usually is to go to court, but it’s doubtful that even a favorable ruling could come in time to salvage this school year or season.

The NCAA rarely comes out looking good. But there are no heroes in this saga, either.

There’s no need to feel bad for UCLA, which put itself in this position by recruiting a player who had not yet reached eligibility. Taking gambles on academic risks can sometimes help the athlete and the school (see Rumeal Robinson’s diploma and Michigan’s 1989 NCAA championship), but sometimes produces results like this, where nobody wins. UCLA is without a player. Cotton is without a school. In a stripped-to-the-bones example of the mercenary nature of college sports, Cotton’s acceptance to UCLA came only on the condition that he be academically eligible to play ball.

In a sense, you can blame basketball for Cotton’s no-basketball predicament. Prep basketball is a year-round occupation now, and the injuries he suffered and the time he spent rehabilitating cut even further into his studies. And although his parents placed an emphasis on academics, to the point that his mom once made him retake a mathematics class in summer school because he got a C, there’s no way this little game of high school hopscotch from St. John Bosco to Mater Dei and back could help his grades or help him prepare for the SAT, which he took twice before he reached the required score in June. The SAT doesn’t really test you on things you’re taught specifically in class. It’s more a gauge of accumulated knowledge, the type of things that come about when you have continuity in your education and develop relationships with your teachers. Those little bits of extra knowledge are impossible to get when you’re skipping from school to school.

Now, if Cotton wants to go anywhere to learn and play basketball this year, it will have to be a prep school or a community college. He could play ball in the Continental Basketball Assn. or head overseas to Europe, but those are the last two places a confused 19-year-old should be right now. Don’t even talk about the NBA. No team would waste its time with a guy who hasn’t played a full season of organized ball since he was in 10th grade.

When McKnight coached Cotton as a sophomore, he had no idea he would be witnessing the peak of a career. He thought it was just the beginning. All he knows about Cotton now is that “he needs to play.” Somewhere, somehow.

“He needs to get out and be in a competitive basketball structure--not the free play, not one-on-one, two-on-two games on weekends--just to keep those skills,” McKnight said.

They are the skills that got him all of that attention and scholarship offers. But what this sad story points out one more time is how those skills don’t get you anything guaranteed.