Confessions of a Fixer

quote:

---

“You fail the course by telling anyone I helped you,” he says he warned the students. “You fail the course by ever mentioning my name. You fail by not doing exactly what I say.”


His fear of being discovered, he says, led him to do much of the coursework himself, sometimes not even telling the players. He made some students believe they were completing the classes, handing them packets of practice problems he had picked up from the math lab at his community college and making sure they logged time in study halls as if they had done the work. After they finished the packets, he would toss them in the trash. Then he would log in to BYU’s website to complete the real assignments.

That’s how some coaches preferred it, he says, as it assured them there wouldn’t be any slip-ups. That also meant that the coaches didn’t have to worry about retaliation. If the players had no knowledge of the fraud, Mr. White says, they couldn’t hold it against anyone.

To pay for the classes, Mr. White often used prepaid credit cards. He purchased them with cash he had received from players’ coaches. His fee depended on how quickly the players needed the credits. A simple setup—three credit hours, six to eight weeks—ran a couple of hundred dollars. A more elaborate job could cost five times as much.

Those first few years, he did almost everything online, unaware of how easily his movements could be monitored. He arranged students’ work on his employer-issued computer and proctored many of the classes himself. But after reading about other coaches who were caught helping players take online classes, he began enrolling students in correspondence courses, figuring he could hide his fraud more easily through the mail.

---

quote:

---

The handwritten notes, by a onetime academic adviser and college-basketball coach, are part of an elaborate scheme. Over the past 14 years, he says, he has used test keys to cheat for hundreds of athletes, helping them meet the eligibility requirements of the National Collegiate Athletic Association

---

quote:

---

Among the few coaches specifically implicated: Stan Heath, formerly at Southern Florida, and Isaiah Thomas, formerly of Florida Atlantic. Heath had no comment; Thomas denied it through a spokeswoman.

Among other schools implicated: Texas, Liberty, Morgan State, Oregon, and Xavier of Ohio.

---