Remember Bishop Sycamore? The highschool soccer crew nobody had heard of that misplaced 58-0 to IMG Academy in a recreation that was in some way broadcast on ESPN? The recreation befell in Canton, Ohio, in August, and on Friday, the Ohio Department of Education launched the report from its monthslong investigation of the varsity.
Turns out it isn’t a faculty in any respect. In the 41-page report, investigators decided that Bishop Sycamore “isn’t a faculty because it purports on paper to be.” They could not verify fundamental details concerning the faculty, like its precise location or the names of any of its lecturers — belongings you usually have to be thought-about a faculty.
The “faculty” didn’t meet the state’s minimal necessities to be thought-about an academic establishment, which led the investigators to 1 inevitable conclusion.
“The details recommend that Bishop Sycamore High School was, and is, in truth, a scam.”
Not fairly a bombshell revelation
The announcement that Bishop Sycamore was a scam comes as a shock to precisely nobody, since folks sensed one thing fishy was occurring from the very begin. During the sport, ESPN announcers implied that the community was duped into broadcasting the sport when Bishop Sycamore instructed them the varsity had a number of prime recruits.
Here’s every little thing the world found about Bishop Sycamore within the days after the sport:
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Their web site was initially devoid of any content material, and was later fleshed out with details about how you can get recruited. Vitally, there was no information about an precise faculty on the positioning. Now a go to to bishopsycamore.org exhibits you primarily nothing, because the area is on the market.
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Bishop Sycamore was not listed on the ODoE’s listing of registered constitution colleges for the 2020-21 educational yr, or the 2021-22 educational yr.
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Bishop Sycamore founder Andre Peterson stated it was an online-only constitution faculty that had simply a P.O. Box, however had supposedly rented out area previous to the pandemic.
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Several college students who performed for Bishop Sycamore have been listed as college students of utterly totally different excessive colleges on recruiting web sites.
And that is simply a tiny sampling of the bizarre, shady, gross and probably unlawful stuff folks found about Bishop Sycamore after it rocketed to fame.
But the most important piece of proof we had that Bishop Sycamore was a scam got here from the pinnacle coach. No, not the pinnacle coach who led the crew to that 58-0 loss, as a result of he was fired shortly after the sport when it was found he had an lively warrant in Ohio and had defaulted on a $100,000 mortgage that he’d used to run one other football-forward “faculty” known as Christians of Faith Academy.
Tyren Jackson, the pinnacle coach who was employed after that man was fired, gave a quote in September that might have diminished the ODoE’s 41-page report to simply a single sheet.
“We are not a school,” Jackson told a local NBC affiliate. “That’s not what Bishop Sycamore is, and I think that’s what the biggest misconception about us was, and that was our fault. Because that was a mistake on paperwork.”
The ODoE was extra thorough of their report, of course, and hopefully now the ebook on Bishop Sycamore could be closed eternally.