Reality for junior college athletes can be a costly discovery

Editor's note: Second of two parts. Read the first part here

UKIAH - Valery Lawton made a trip to Redwood country recently to visit her son, Alexander O'Neal, who had been playing football at Mendocino College. Shopping at Wal-Mart here, Lawton spotted a couple of young, fit African-American men.

“I figured they were football players,” Lawton, a public health worker and realtor who lives in Chipley, Florida, said by phone. “And they were.”

The junior-college football players tend to stand out in this lumber-and-wine community, as evidenced by the recent uproar over a crowded house near downtown. The large majority of Eagles players are black, and they come from distant cities.

A junior-college sports team is a fluid thing, but the most recent Mendocino College roster posted online lists 47 players. One of them is hard to pin down, geographically. Of the other 46, only 10 are from California, and just eight from the college's district. Ten players are from Georgia, nine from Florida, four from Alaska.

This seems like an odd arrangement for a small-town JC. But if Mendocino College is more extreme than some in this regard, it is by no means unique.

Football, with its large rosters and complicated equipment, is an expensive sport. Therefore, not every juco offers it. Those that do attract the players left out of major college recruiting – athletes who are not quite big enough, or not quite fast enough, or who do not qualify academically. Many of those athletes gravitate to California, which has a wealth of JC football programs and no entrance requirements. Most dream of making the leap to a four-year program – as Detroit native and Mendocino College product Jamar King did recently when he signed with the University of Alabama.

These players need the junior colleges. And the JCs need them. Schools like Mendocino College stock most of their sports team with local kids. That's much harder to do for football. In Mendocino's case, the school has trouble competing with Santa Rosa Junior College to the south, and Butte College to the east, and College of the Redwoods to the north.

If Mendocino College wants to field a competitive football team, it must cast its net far and wide.

Not all of the players it reels in are fully prepared for life after high school. As young as 18, they sometimes show up in Ukiah with $1,000 or less in their pockets, no job and no housing. On occasion, they haven't even secured a spot on the football team.

“Some of these guys just show up,” Mendocino College athletic director Matt Gordon said. “Happens to every program: ‘I'm here.' That's a challenge.”

Gordon is right. It does happen at other JCs.

Even those who have roster spots aren't always equipped, emotionally or financially. At four-year universities, most students have the option of at least one year in a dormitory, with optional meal plan.

Some junior colleges have dorms, like Redwoods (in Eureka), Feather River (Quincy) and Shasta (Redding). Most do not, including Mendocino and SRJC. They are commuter campuses, and a kid from rural Georgia has nowhere to commute from.

In a town such as Ukiah, with a limited housing market and California rental prices, the situation can be brutal.

When O'Neal first came to Ukiah in 2014, coaches directed him to the Discovery Inn, a nondescript motel on North State Street. He discovered the entire second floor was occupied by football players. They called their home “the Disco.”

Conditions were not ideal. Several players, as they prepared to move out of the Hortense Street house from which they were being evicted on Friday, described life at the Disco. They said prostitutes turned tricks at the motel and cockroaches scurried across the floor. One player got bitten up by bedbugs. The athletes paid $500 a month or more each and weren't allowed to use the swimming pool or take advantage of the breakfast buffet. Those amenities were reserved for nightly guests.

“We had to wash our clothes in the tub,” one said.

O'Neal never warmed to the motel, and soon returned home to Florida. But he couldn't soothe his football itch, and he asked Mendocino football coach Frank Espy if he could return to the program this year. Lawton said Espy instructed O'Neal to check in at the Discovery Inn again. But football players had worn out their welcome; this time, Espy told the athlete not to identify himself as a member of the team.

Lenny Wagner, the Santa Rosa JC football coach, knows all about the crunch.

“We turn kids away because they can't find housing,” Wagner said. “We turn away lots of kids. First thing we tell them is, you have to find your own housing, and it's really expensive.”

Will Rutledge, a 24-year old Mendo running back from Atlanta, said the housing situation was probably worse in Santa Barbara, his previous junior-college stop.

And food and clothing can be just as hard to secure as shelter. Players began moving into Ukiah in early July for football practice. (School starts in August.) Most had applied for financial aid, and most of those were eligible. But the first aid check doesn't arrive until October. For an extended summer, the students were on their own dime.

“I was broke before the school year started,” said Carlos James, 19, a defensive lineman from Seattle.

Some of the Mendo players talked about eating one meal a day during the summer.

One partial solution of the past was EBT, better known as food stamps. But recent changes in the administration of EBT require that new entries into the system prove they work at least 20 hours per week.

“We're trying to balance football, school. It's kind of hard to get a job,” said Jamel Benemon, 19, of Tampa, Florida. “Because if you get a job, there's something gonna slip.”

Some in Ukiah were outraged by Mendocino's hands-off approach.

“As an outsider now, but one with a lot of experience, I think there is a moral obligation when you bring minors thousands of miles, a moral obligation to make sure they have an experience you'd want your own children to have,” said Larry McLeitch, who was Mendocino College's first football coach in the 1970s, and who later served on the institution's board of trustees.

But school officials and coaches feel they are in a no-win position. The California Community College Athletics Association, which oversees juco sports in the state, places strict limitations on what a school can offer its athletes.

“There are no hookups when it comes to housing,” Wagner said. “When I first got here, I'd go out to apartments and ask them, ‘Do you rent to students?' People would say, ‘If I have a choice to rent to a family of four or to four college students, I'll rent to the family.' Can you blame them?”

In particular, a public junior college can't provide athlete benefits it doesn't make available to all students, including housing.

Mendocino College students can ride the local bus line for free (though not during the summer). If they have need, they can access a campus food pantry. The school offers study hall, tutors and financial aid counseling. But it can't go much deeper to nurture students, including athletes.

According to the Ukiah Daily Journal, Mendocino College president Arturo Reyes recently divulged that Espy has signed the lease for the controversial house on Hortense Street. That was a violation. The college discovered the infraction and self-reported to the CCCAA. In the wake of that disclosure, Espy certainly had even less wiggle room to assist his players.

“Me giving a ride can be taken as giving an improper benefit,” Espy said. “Beyond that, what can a coach do? If a player comes to you and says, ‘I'm hungry,' what do you do? What do you do?”

The question is how clearly the coaches disclose all of this when they are recruiting out-of-state players.

“We send out information that describes the cost of tuition, how to get hold of a counselor, how to take placement tests, how to apply for financial aid,” Gordon said. “General information about the college. … There's no expectation that college is free.”

The Eagles football players provide mixed reports. Some insist Espy offered nothing that Mendocino was unable to deliver. Others dispute that.

“When the coaches called us, they said that it would be pretty cheap living. They said it would be affordable,” one football player said. “And basically they told us we'd be staying in an apartment. Then we get here and we're staying in the Discovery Inn.”

Students generally paid $500 to $600 apiece to live at the inn. Same at the house on Hortense, which for at least two weeks had no hot water.

Some Ukiah residents are convinced the junior college is making money off the backs of its football players. If that's the case, the revenue certainly isn't coming from the gate at home games. The Eagles draw sparse crowds.

Tuition is a more complicated issue. Resident tuition at Mendocino College is $46 per unit. Non-resident tuition is $211 per unit. The website collegeview.com, citing figures from the 2014-15 school year, put annual in-state tuition and fees at the college at $1,422; the out-of-state figure was $5,892.

It's a difference. Enough of a difference to lure a football program into deceiving its athletes?

No way, said Gordon, the Mendocino AD.

“Most athletic programs at most California community colleges aren't generating profit,” he said. “I think it's been well documented.”

In Ukiah, the controversy doesn't seem to be going away. Barry Vogel, a local attorney who has advocated for the students on Hortense Street, thinks the college can do more.

“If they're hiding behind the NCAA or the CCCAA and sweeping it under the rug,” Vogel said, “then let's look under the rug.”