The NCAA has officially notified the Old Dominion Athletic Conference that Guilford College’s football team will not have three of their wins revoked despite unknowingly playing ineligible cornerback, Dion Rich. Under NCAA Division III transfer rules Rich was made academically ineligible to play any sports for failing out of Emory & Henry College in the fall semester of 2005.

Instead, the NCAA Committee of Infractions has charged Guilford with a secondary violation.

Rich was kicked out of Guilford shortly after mid-terms for lying on his application, therefore violating the school’s honor code. Rich only submitted a high school transcript with his application and enrolled at Guilford in the fall of 2006.

“No one at our school was aware that he had attended Emory & Henry,” said Athletic Director Marion Kirby.

Kirby continued; “We feel just as violated in many ways as anybody.”

It was brought to the ODAC’s attention that Guilford was using an ineligible player shortly after Emory & Henry head coach Don Montgomery finished reviewing the Quaker’s game film.
He recognized Rich immediately and notified ODAC commissioner Brad Bankston.

The ODAC is a relatively tightly knit conference. The football division contains just seven teams and roughly 700 players. All of the teams are located in Virginia, North Carolina, or Washington, D.C.

Is it the ODAC’s job to review each team’s roster annually and make sure that there are no ineligible players in use? Or is the school’s job to keep an eye out for such violations?

Somewhat surprisingly, it’s solely the school’s duty.

Guilford prides itself on its honor code and its core values, two of which are honesty and integrity.

While it is admirable that Guilford, in honoring its Quaker roots, would like to believe that people are inherently genuine and trustworthy, sometimes they just aren’t.

I’m not suggesting that every time a student applies to Guilford claiming to have taken a year off (as Rich did) that the admissions and/or athletics committee should do a full background check.

But what about an alteration in the system? Perhaps the athletics department and their recruiters need to be more closely in contact with the admissions committee, and visa versa.

There is undoubtedly a social divide between the athletes and non-athletes at Guilford. Is there a divide in the administration, too?

The fact that an incident such as this had to occur near the end of a very respectable 6-4 season for the Quakers is especially unfortunate since the team is starting to build a tough reputation for themselves in the ODAC with players such as Micah Rushing and Josh Vogelbach earning conference wide recognition and breaking school records.

When something goes wrong at Guilford College, students are often quick to isolate the blame to the administration. Doing so in this situation would be entirely pointless and counterproductive. No administration in their right mind would ever knowingly grant acceptance to an ineligible player that lied on their application.

Students, faculty, and members of the administration that read this article should not point their fingers at the flaws of the system, but instead they should do their own investigation and exercise whatever is in their immediate power to improve, and encourage communication within the system.