Isiah Miller shows his old football jersey outside of his apartment building in the University Heights neighbourhood of the Bronx on December 10. Photo / Desiree Rios, The New York Times
A start-up football school called Christians of Faith, later known as Bishop Sycamore, recruited players from tough neighbourhoods with talk of academic help and a path to glory. But the path only led them back to where they started.
Isiah Miller sat in his New York City apartment, staring into his iPhone at what looked like a new world. On the video call, two fellow football players from his high school beckoned him to join them in Ohio on their powerhouse prep team.
Check out our hotel room, they told him. Look at our Xenith helmets and Adidas gear. Oh, and say hello to our roommates — maybe your future teammates? — who are also on the fast track to big-time college football.
"They said, 'You want to come to your dream school; come here,'" recalled Miller, 22, who had just graduated from high school and needed to boost his grades if he hoped to play college football. "They said, 'Come out here to Ohio; we play IMG,'" he recalled, referring to IMG Academy, the Florida prep school where some young athletes play on national TV and go on to win championships.
Miller, 19 back in summer 2018, stuffed his belongings into a half-dozen bags and bought a US$56 bus ticket to Columbus, in a state he had never visited, to suit up for a school he had never heard of, all in pursuit of the glory he was sure he would never find in the Bronx.
"Football," he said, "was my way out."
But his new prep school, Christians of Faith Academy, didn't prioritise education. And it lacked stable accommodations: The team got kicked out of at least two hotels, and for a while the players were wedged into a coach's girlfriend's house, with one shower for 40 boys, most of them in their late teens.
The school didn't get much attention until this August, when it played a televised game against IMG Academy and made a splash on ESPN for all the wrong reasons.
By then it was known as Bishop Sycamore, and the team, which had played a game only two days before, was pummelled, 58-0. Reporters later highlighted myriad legal, financial and governance problems involving Bishop Sycamore and its founders.
Almost overnight, Bishop Sycamore became shorthand for sports factories that cynically masquerade as schools to produce elite, made-for-TV athletes. This case happened to be more egregious because of the lopsided score and because Christians of Faith's dubious academics had been exposed before it resurfaced under a new name and showed up on ESPN.
"Unfortunately," the Ohio Department of Education said in report released Friday, "the facts suggest that Bishop Sycamore High School was and is, in fact, a scam."
In an interview, Roy Johnson, the academy's founder, said he could not discuss much because Michael Strahan, the television host and former football star, is producing an HBO documentary.
"Everything will come out in the documentary," Johnson said, noting that several of his former athletes now play college football. "Different people's perspectives."
Yet less attention has been paid to the perspectives of the players who descended upon Columbus and entrusted their futures to strangers.
They came from as far away as Georgia and California, and many came from Detroit. But few communities were better represented — or in the end, more disappointed — than two areas in the Bronx where football players, many of them black and poor, grew up within blocks of one another.
Rodney Atkins, a quarterback from the East Bronx, was sold on Christians of Faith Academy's grand plans, and then helped persuade at least a half-dozen people to leave the borough for Columbus.
Since then, however, Marysol Atkins, his mother, says that her son, now 22, has second-guessed everything. He returned to Columbus for a second year believing things might be different, but he was living out of his car or sleeping in a storage unit by the end of that season. He has not played football since, and he did not receive his high school diploma until this fall.
Now Rodney, who his mother says is "broken," is in a Bronx hospital psychiatric ward.
"These boys believed in something, and they fought hard to end up with nothing," she said.
She added: "Who's going to look at that opportunity and say, 'I can't handle a little bit of struggle, when all I've known is struggle?'"
Christians of Faith Academy was founded in 2018 by Johnson, a charismatic former insurance salesman and registered health care provider. Other associates later included Andre Peterson, who played for Jim Tressel at Youngstown State in the 1980s and is also an ordained minister.
But when Marysol Atkins travelled to Columbus from her home in North Carolina in the summer of 2018 to check on her son, she was taken aback.
"I walked into chaos," she said, recalling just one adult staff member supervising two floors of a Baymont Inn full of boys, some days with barely anything to eat. She ended up staying three months, becoming an unofficial team mum.
For months, several players and Atkins said, they raised questions about housing, school, food, facilities and even money for coaches' salaries. The answer was the same: Help is on the way.
The players were set up with accounts for online learning, but nobody monitored whether they were signing up for classes or doing the schoolwork. Players said they were taken to an empty lot and told that a school and workout facility would soon be built there.
"He kept acting like the money was supposed to come," Atkins said of Johnson.
Peterson, the former Youngstown State player, said he and his wife, along with Johnson and the coaches, had pumped thousands of dollars of their own money into the programme because they believed in "trying to help young men who need help."
"If it was about the money, I'm probably the stupidest businessman in my life or anyone else's," Peterson said.
Inevitably, with rapidly expanding limits on parents' desire to fund their children's athletic pursuits, some see a business opportunity.
IMG Academy, established in Bradenton, Florida, as a boarding school for elite tennis players, branched out into football a decade ago. It is now owned by Endeavour, the Hollywood sports and entertainment company. Similar prep schools, essentially basketball teams looking for classroom space, popped up from Nevada to North Carolina.
When Rick Singer, a private admissions counsellor and the mastermind of the Operation Varsity Blues college admissions scheme, needed someone to doctor test scores to help his clients' children get into college, he turned to an administrator at IMG, where he once served as a consultant. IMG was not implicated in the scandal, and the administrator was fired.
As different as they were, Singer's operation, which made him more than US$20 million, shared a trait with Bishop Sycamore and Christians of Faith: They capitalised on the ambitions of those who didn't have the prerequisites — be it test scores or 40-yard dash times — to get into college through the front door.
Mario Agyen, a running back from the Bronx and a friend of Isiah Miller, wanted to continue playing when he graduated from high school, but he had few options.
He was searching online for postgraduate options when a coach in Ohio contacted him through Twitter.
Christians of Faith, the coach told Agyen, was a startup high school football team that accepted postgraduates. He could go there for a year, improve his GPA through online classes and have video to show college recruiters.
At the end of the day, Agyen said, the players sometimes didn't know where they would sleep. After being kicked out of two hotels, they stayed briefly in cabins at a rural retreat with no phone service and then at a complex where they slept on air mattresses in empty apartments.
A handful of players resorted to stealing food from nearby grocery stores, Agyen said, while others called their parents and teachers back home for money.
Johnson said that while online courses were available, he should have done more.
"I should have done, myself personally, a better job of making sure that they signed online and did their stuff," he said.
Peterson, meanwhile, disputed the suggestion that players didn't have enough to eat, saying that his wife and niece regularly prepared food and that a "food room" was always available.
The state of Ohio revoked Christians of Faith Academy's registration in October 2018, after criticism from church leaders and longtime scholastic sports officials in ThisWeek Community News of Columbus.
So the academy simply rebranded as Bishop Sycamore. State records show that BSF Bishop Sycamore Foundation was incorporated in August 2019, with Peterson still mentioned as a leader.
When Bishop Sycamore made news after the ESPN game, however, Peterson fired Johnson and hired another coach. According to Peterson, Bishop Sycamore currently offers online courses, and Peterson said his son is a student.
Education officials in Ohio have had limited tools to monitor Bishop Sycamore because it is a non-chartered, non-tax-supported school. Those schools do not receive any public dollars and are subject to few regulations because they declare "truly held religious beliefs."
Still, in August, Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, citing "red flags about the school's operations," directed the Ohio Department of Education to investigate. And Friday, the department, citing a "pattern of misdirection," determined that the school had not met the minimum standards and appeared to be a scam. The department also said it would consult with the attorney general's office regarding possible legal action.
Bishop Sycamore reported to the state that its enrolment in 2020-21 was three students. This year it said it was one.
Most of the Bronx players who took a chance on Columbus have since returned to New York. Some, like Agyen, who is attending Louisville and hopes to walk on to the football team next season, are in college. A few are pinning their hopes on a community college. Some said they would not go back to school.
Nobody is further from the big dreams shared on that FaceTime call than Rodney Atkins.
On Wednesday, as he sat on the bed in his otherwise empty room in the psychiatric ward at Jacobi Medical Centre, he considered his future. He said he had taken too much of his medication and was admitted involuntarily.
Does he regret going to Columbus?
"I would say no," he said. "It's an experience. You can always take pros and cons out of everything. I still think it's a good opportunity, a good vision. But you need money to make the dream work, and there was a lack of."
He paused.
"It's ironic," Atkins said. "It's called Christians of Faith. Everybody who was involved was working on faith."
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: David W Chen, Billy Witz, Alanis Thames and Kevin Draper
Photographs by: Desiree Rios, Maddie McGarvey and Edward Linsmier
© 2021 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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