You have to love the National Collegiate Athletic Association. They continually strive to operate in the vein of what is best for student athletes, both current and future.
I submit the case of Isaiah Brock as an example.
Brock, a member of the armed forces, and has served in Afghanistan for the past four years. As a member of the Quartermaster Mortuary Affairs company, his job was to retrieve the bodies of fallen comrades in order to return them home to their loved ones. Brock said of his job: ” So we would basically look through all of their wounds, annotate everything, go through their belongings, and then.. you know how there’s always a transfer case and then you have a flag draped over the top of the transfer case? That’s us. That’s what we do.”
Brock played in a basketball event that brought soldiers and coaches together; Michigan State’s Tom Izzo and Oakland’s Greg Kampe were amongst the coaches there. Kampe was impressed with the 6-8 Brock; so much so that that a scholarship would be offered upon his discharge from the service.
It was truly a feel good story, until the NCAA stumbled in. They took a look at Brock’s high school marks, from 2011, which were good, but the Baltimore high school he attended had an overall subpar academic performance. This lead the organization to label Brock as a “non-qualifier” , meaning he is ineligible , despite the fact his standardized scores met the NCAA standards and he has a 3.0 G.P.A. in the online courses he had been taking at Oakland.
Oakland plans to appeal this decision.
