Because of very old anti-pagan measures, no real bishop can have a tree- related name. You could tell from that.
Here's an article on a prior scam school by the same guy: https://www.freep.com/story/sports/highschool/2021/09/02/bishop-sycamore-football-another-suspicious-high-school-christians-of-faith/5670371001/
The scam last time seems to have been getting loans for the fake school. You'd think that would be a staid subindustry with lots of red tape, but maybe charter schools and online schools are so deregulated in some states lending standards have slipped?
Homeschoolers grouping together to form Christian private schools that operate online isn't terribly unusual. I think it's legal in at least some states, or at any rate is in a gray area where a lot of homeschooling has always been. So drawing the line between that scenario and a scam may not be so easy.
Here's a long post on this kind of thing through charter schools (instead of private christian schools). I don't know as much about that way, because charter schools didn't really exist when I was a kid. http://www.marvelousmomsclub.com/homeschooling-independently-vs-homeschooling-with-a-charter-school/
TL;DR: Charter school homeschooling pro: curriculum, field trips, computers are free, con: you're required to have some of your science books not be creationist.
So drawing the line between that scenario and a scam may not be so easy.
They apparently literally weren't taking classes, not even desultorily. Like, the closest equivalent was someone drove to a local library for a few hours.
Are the Catholics particularly implicated in running sports academies? I know in Maryland, DeMatha is the big sports high school, and it's a Catholic school. And a quick Google tells me that LeBron James went to St. Vincent-St. Mary High in Akron.
Many years ago -- when I was in my 30s -- I had occasion to attend as an observer a basketball seminar in Memphis run by legendary DeMatha coach Morgan Wooten. I learned two things to the vast benefit of my pickup basketball game: When shooting, your off-hand should never interfere with your shot in any way. (A righthanded player should think of his left hand as "the devil," Wooten said.)
And possession of the ball should never slow you down on a fast break. You don't really dribble -- you push the ball upcourt as far as you can run to keep up with it.
I only tell you this because I suspect I will not be facing any of you in pickup basketball.
I'm not saying that this wasn't a scam, I'm saying that I'm not at all surprised that regulators didn't easily catch it.
Shocking revelation about Bishop Sycamore!
In the latest twist in the strange saga of Bishop Sycamore, the football team's new head coach said Monday that the self-proclaimed high school is not, in fact, an actual school.
Tyren Jackson, who identifies himself on social media as the new head coach at Bishop Sycamore, told WCMH-TV in Columbus that he believed a "mistake on paperwork" had resulted in a "misconception" that Bishop Sycamore High School is a school.
He described it instead as a "post-grad football academy."
"We do not offer curriculum," Jackson told the TV station. "We are not a school. 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."
https://www.dispatch.com/story/sports/2021/09/06/bishop-sycamores-new-football-coach-not-actual-school/5749855001/
Oh, and maybe there's some quieter non-litigated grift if schools get some cut of the ESPN revenue?
The truly inexcusable thing is that the football team is so bad. If you're going to have a football team associated with an educational institution that doesn't provide any actual education, the football team, at least, should be good.
You can't get good players if nobody heard of your school.
Salesman 1: He sells teams, football teams.
Salesman 2: But he doesn't know the territory!
At least the modern scam is without show tunes.
I wouldn't play for any football team that would have me.
16: But heebie, we offered you millions! You're our quarterback of the future!
Is our future online on this website? I could probably QB in a comment thread, max.
18: That's the kind of innovative thinking we need on our team! The football field has never worked out for us. Maybe we'd do better in a comment thread.
It's a wild story, and very unclear what their angle was. They don't seem to have been actually making any significant money at any point and were constantly skipping out on hotel bills and the like. They took out loans, but this wasn't the kind of exploitation of government loan programs that for-profit colleges do. Student loans aren't really a thing at the high school level, and it seems like what they were doing was just applying to banks for various kinds of loans in the school's name then not paying them back. In one of the links an ex-player speculates that the coach was trying to parlay the exposure from playing hot-shot HS teams into a college coaching gig, which seems as good an explanation as any but still super weird.
Borrowing money and not paying it back is a classic angle.
I guess it's an angle that usually works best when you don't go on the TV to call attention to yourself.
21: If the plan was to get hired as a football coach, they probably needed a team that wouldn't be so preposterously terrible at football.
25: Come to think of it, that's the same thing that went wrong with my plan to be an NBA superstar.
To be an NBA superstar, you need to be terrible as baseball.