Wait a minute

You had a dream when you were a kid. You wanted to play big-time Division I college basketball.\nYou weren't good enough to be recruited by the Dukes, Kentuckys or Arizonas of the college basketball world. But you were recruited by St. Bonaventure, an Atlantic 10 school of 2,200 students located in Olean, N.Y.\nIt offered you a scholarship, and you accept. You won't get to play in a major conference, but you will play in a conference where you will have a shot to get an at-large NCAA tournament bid.\nPlus it's only about an hour and a half to Buffalo, so you don't have to worry about being far from exciting big-city culture. By the way, you have a rapier wit.\nThe coach who recruited you was Jim Baron. He got his bachelor's and master's degrees from St. Bonaventure, and he sold you on his love of the school. Plus, of all the players who played for him at St. Bonaventure, 95 percent eventually graduated.\nYour freshman year, you lose to Kentucky 85-80 in double overtime in the first round of the 2000 NCAA tournament. Sure it hurt, as would any double-overtime loss in the NCAA tournament, but you were in it until the end, and that Kentucky team had two current NBA players (Tayshaun Prince and Jamaal Magloire) and two potential NBA players (Keith Bogans and Marvin Stone).\nYou went to the National Invitation Tournament in 2001, a significant accomplishment for your school.\nThen, Baron left.\nAfter the 2000-01 season, he took the coaching job at the University of Rhode Island. Wait a minute here. The only reason you came here was for the coach -- well that and the proximity to Canada and its legal drinking age of 19 … but the coach primarily.\nYou know you can't transfer because you would have to sit out a year, and you don't want to do that. So you stay at St. Bonaventure.\nAfter all, the new coach sounds promising. He's Jan van Breda Kolff, a coaching success at Cornell, Vanderbilt and Pepperdine. On the St. Bonaventure Web site, it says that he values "integrity, dedication and self-sacrifice in his program."\nSt. Bonaventure president Robert Wickenheiser said when he was hired, "I see our basketball program in a position to continue to make great strides. We feel that Jan's combination of expertise, experience and class will help lead us to new heights." Plus, didn't his team badly beat Bob Knight's team in the 2000 NCAA tournament when he was at Pepperdine?\nYou'll give him a chance.\nFlash forward to this season. One of your new players, Jamil Terrell, a transfer from Coastal Georgia Community College, is averaging seven points and five rebounds a game. He is a big help to your frontcourt.\nThen, all of a sudden, you find out a week and a half ago that Terrell is ineligible for violating junior college transfer rules. You have to forfeit six conference wins and are not allowed to play in the Atlantic 10 Tournament, your annual chance to make it to the NCAA tournament.\nYour last two regular season games have been rendered meaningless. You find out that it wasn't just an honest mistake. You see that Wickenheiser, whose son, Kort, is an assistant coach -- so much for nepotism laws -- knew full well that Terrell had not taken the core courses in order to pass the NCAA Clearinghouse, and that he had only earned a welding certificate and not an associate's degree. (No wonder he was such a good rebounder; he might have helped manufacture the rims).\nWait another minute, you say. Coach van Breda Kolff wouldn't just let this happen. After all, he is a man of "integrity" and "class."\nThe team meets to decide what to do. Where was athletics director Gothard Lane to put a stop to this, you wonder? All the public knows at this point is that we have an ineligible player and have to forfeit six games.\nWe have a vote and decide to forfeit the last two games against Massachusetts and Dayton. Pundits everywhere excoriate us for quitting. But how could we take instruction from our deceitful coaches and administrators? You can't even look van Breda Kolff in the eye anymore.\nFinally, (three days ago), Robert Wickenheiser resigns while van Breda Kolff, Lane and Kort Wickenheiser are all put on administrative leave, probably so the university can negotiate contract buyouts for all of them.\nYou know that by forfeiting the last two games you may have overreacted. But you know that with the paid higher-ups perpetrating a fraud upon you, your whole senior season was pretty pointless.\nWhat happened to your dream?