It has yet to become relevant in Colorado, but the national open-door policy granted earlier this month to prep student-athletes displaced by Hurricane Katrina is being questioned along the Gulf Coast weeks into the football season.
While a dozen student-athlete requests by evacuees from the New Orleans area have been processed here, Louisiana’s considerable load of talent among 85 area football programs has hundreds of its players at schools in the northern part of its state and many of the South’s other recruiting hotbeds such as Florida, Georgia and Mississippi.
The debate is on: Are people genuinely helping others in a time of disaster, or are they preying on the desperate who lost everything? Do they care about providing homes and schools to young people, or is their main concern winning games? And why is giving young people a fresh start such a problem?
“What do you do? You’re giving a kid a place to stay,” Gateway football coach Jeff Sweet said. “They don’t have anything.”
Sweet acknowledged after his team’s Friday victory against Aurora rival Hinkley that Andrew Dennis, a student-athlete from the New Orleans area, will be at practice Monday. Others among the Denver area, Colorado Springs and mountain towns that have received evacuees are senior Chris Kelly and junior Benjamin Valteau at Hinkley, and Joe Riccobono at Maranatha Christian in Arvada.
The Colorado High School Activities Association projected as many as two dozen inquiries, and in multiple sports, but assistant commissioner Bert Borgmann said, “I don’t think we’ll have as many people as we thought at the beginning. They’re finding places closer to home until they can move back to their original homes.”
Meanwhile, Louisiana High School Activities Association commissioner Tommy Henry is experiencing a series of nightmares, with football, the nation’s most popular schoolboy sport, at the front. Allegations are flying, such as recruiters scouring shelters for athletes, advertising through e-mail and on the Internet for players at particular positions, and requesting specific contact information from Louisiana schools, contrary to state prep recruiting rules.
Henry vowed to The New York Times that his state will severely punish any wrongdoing, but he knows proving it is difficult enough without the additional ramifications of a disaster.
“The way things are so messed up, you’re going to have to bring me a videotape of any acts of wrongdoing,” Henry told The Times from the association’s office in Baton Rouge. “There’s so much confusion about who saw what, but if I do catch someone, the book will be thrown at them.
“I know that I’ve had several e-mails that say, ‘We need a quarterback and receiver, or a couple of basketball players.’ Like everything else, this storm has brought out the best and worst in people. I’d like to think mostly the best.”
Borgmann, in Texas for a district meeting, has encountered some of it. Reports out of Houston, he said, also have players trying to enroll at schools after they have used up eligibility – on top of the fact the state expects as many as 60,000 evacuees as students in grades K-12.
“And there are other stories of people shopping kids around,” Borgmann said.
In Colorado, family ties have been the state’s primary magnet for evacuees. Kelly and Valteau have found new homes and new places to play. Valteau was able to drive out of Louisiana before the height of the storm, then took a plane to Denver to live with a cousin in Aurora. But Kelly stayed throughout the storm, waded through flood waters, got to the Superdome, then headed to the Rocky Mountains with his father by automobile to join other family members.
How was it in the Superdome?
“Stinky,” Kelly said.
Of the many difficult thoughts in his head the past three weeks, Kelly said near the top “is catching up in school.”
Neither he nor Valteau plans to leave Colorado. Ditto for Riccobono, from Covington, north of New Orleans. His previous home, which withstood the storm, will serve as a new home for relatives in the area, including an uncle who has three trees in his home’s living room.
“I give it my best when I’m on the field,” said Riccobono, who had three touchdown catches in his Maranatha debut eight days ago. “But when I’m off the field I hope and pray that everyone is still all right.”
Riccobono, whose tuition at Maranatha is being paid anonymously by two families, also experienced two first days of school in different states. On Saturday, with his parents on the sideline at Columbine High School cheering and rooting on their son with a distinctly Cajun twang, he caught five passes for 152 yards and a touchdown. He also had five tackles and a sack.
“He’s a great guy and a great football player,” Maranatha Christian quarterback Dan Pierson said. “Him coming from New Orleans, it means a lot to have him out here. It’s a bad situation for us to have to get him, but it means a lot to have him playing for our team.”
As for giving evacuees new places to live and play, it seems to soften charges of recruiting.
“We don’t have anything,” Kelly said.
Gateway quarterback Greg Bolling, who spearheaded his team’s 57-15 drubbing of Hinkley on Friday night, said, “We’re glad they’re here. It’s nice to have them.”
Borgmann said state association officials are working diligently to make “it a cleaner process … you hope people don’t (recruit players for their own benefit), but it does happen.”
Either way, Hinkley coach Bob Bozied is convinced compassion should be the bottom line – there are no redshirt seasons for high school players who also missed the beginning of school. “Our whole team and the student body has embraced them,” he said. “You can’t imagine what they went through, and they need help.”
Montbello football coach Oliver Lucas agreed.
“It’s open-door policy; those kids need to be in school somewhere,” he said. “They should have a choice to go where they want to go. I just want the best for those people. I mean, they need a break, and if we can open our doors here in the public schools or the private schools, we need to.”
High school sports editor Neil H. Devlin can be reached at 303-820-1714 or ndevlin@denverpost.com.
Jon E. Yunt can be reached at 303-820-5446 or jyunt@denverpost.com.
Brian Forbes contributed to this report.
