The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football by Jeff Benedict, Armen Keteyian Read Free Book Online Page A

convenience store. One of the players approached a parked car, opened the driver’s-side door, brandished a weapon and told the individual in the driver’s seat, “Give me everything you have.” The other player opened the rear passenger’s-side door and told the occupant, “Give us everything you’ve got.” A store security camera captured the entire incident. And police recovered a powered pellet gun from the car driven by the players. Richardson pleaded guilty to reduced charges. All three players were kicked off the team.
    At the same time, coaches continued to recruit players of questionable character, which put increased pressure on the members of Orange Pride. At one point, one of the assistant coaches approached Earps with a particularly onerous request. “One recruit was coming into town, and one of the coaches actually asked me if I knew any girls that would ‘show him a good time.’ ”
    Earps was not naïve. She’d certainly heard stories about hostesses having sex with recruits. But intimacy with high school athletes was something she never considered and never witnessed. Nor did she appreciate seeing a coach actively on the hunt for a girl to go to bed with a recruit. “He wasn’t expecting an Orange Pride hostess to do that,” Earps said. “He was looking for other girls that might do that.”
    Still, the whole idea turned her off, and she put the coach in his place. “No, absolutely not,” Earps told the coach.
    Charli Henry said she was never outright asked to sleep with a player either. But the expectation of sex to lure high school recruits was something she felt almost immediately after she joined Orange Pride. “I am a competitiveperson,” Henry said. “I did not want to be a mediocre recruiter. I wanted to be a top recruiter.”
    Henry felt compromised, the reality far from the television fantasy she admired growing up. “It’s kinda like a Catch-22,” she said. “You wear high heels and your blazer. You look your best. I could always see myself as one of those beautiful women on the football field. But when you get into it and you learn the real reason you dress like that, the real reason your pants are tight, it’s just warped. That was the reality for me.”
    As the 2009 season wound down, Henry began to question the whole idea of using hostesses to help recruit. “These are high school boys,” she said. “They have one thing on their mind. So if you can show them that if you’re a UT football player, this is what you get …
    “What I realized in my experience was that it wasn’t really what I expected,” she said. “It really altered my opinion on the whole thing. From the athletic department’s perspective it didn’t matter how the recruit got there. Whatever it took. A lot of people turned a blind eye. That was very unsettling to me.
    “I could recruit, but I couldn’t do what I was supposed to do, something that was ethically wrong to me in my mind. So at that point I was just disgusted, completely disgusted.”
    Henry decided she would not return to Orange Pride after the season ended.

    Tennessee played its final regular-season game on November 28, defeating Kentucky 30–24. The win gave Tennessee a 7-5 record and earned the Vols an invitation to a bowl game against Virginia Tech. As soon as the regular season ended, Earps turned her attention to final exams. On December 8 she was studying in the library when she got a message over Facebook from a friend: “OMG—did you see article?” The message contained a link to a
New York Times
story: N.C.A.A. PUTS TENNESSEE ’ S RECRUITING UNDER SCRUTINY .
    Earps opened the link and began reading: “The N.C.A.A. is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into the University of Tennessee’s football recruiting practices, according to interviews with several prospects, their family members and high school administrators. A significant part of the investigation is focused on the use of recruiting hostesses who