Sports
Virginia coach, 22, posed as 13-year-old and played in high school hoops game – The Guardian
Woman wore absent girl’s jersey and scored goals before she and other coach lost jobs after basketball caper was discovered
Two Virginia high school basketball coaches have lost their jobs after one of them posed as a student athlete and played in a game for their team.
The assistant coach at the center of the failed caper – who has been identified as Arlisha Boykins – is 22, and she impersonated a 13-year-old player, according to the local news station which first reported on the case, WAVY.
Boykins had reportedly been serving as an assistant to the head coach of the Churchland high school junior varsity girls basketball team, Jahmal Street, when their players faced off against Nansemond River in Suffolk, Virginia, on 21 January.
Video of the game obtained by the Virginia news station WTKR showed Boykins wearing the No 1 jersey of a player who was out of town. In the footage, she is seen collecting an offensive rebound and scoring over a shorter defender.
Boykins is also seen driving to the goal, scoring a right-handed layup while earning a foul shot, gesturing with a finger pointed down (which players often do after making that particular kind of play) and exchanging congratulatory hand slaps with members of her team.
Someone reported the ploy to Churchland, whose administrators were not in attendance, and the school forfeited the contest, snapping a four-game winning streak, multiple reports said. Street and Boykins have since stopped working for Churchland, and the players of the varsity and JV teams at the school voted to cancel the rest of their seasons.
News of Boykins’s impersonation caused an uproar in Churchland’s hometown, Portsmouth, and has since gone viral online.
“I really thought it was a joke,” Churchland resident and basketball referee Gregory Bell II said in an interview on Wednesday with the local news outlet WVEC about getting word of the scandal from a friend.
Bell said the ones for whom he felt the worst were the children whose seasons had been compromised because of seemingly farcical circumstances.
“When you hear about an adult impeding on an event where kids are taking place, that’s not fair to them,” Bell remarked. “You don’t want … to be known for something like this, especially on a national level.”
The executive director of the organization which oversees high school sports in Virginia, Billy Haun, added: “We failed kids, because we’ve got a group of young ladies who will not be able to finish their season because of the behavior of some adults.”
Boykins isn’t the only person in the US to be publicly accused of impersonating a high school student recently, a concept which numerous Hollywood films have built plots around despite the serious consequences that it has had in real-life cases.
Authorities in New Jersey in January arrested a 29-year-old woman who allegedly enrolled at a high school after providing a fake birth certificate meant to convince officials that she was eligible to take classes.
The woman, identified as Hyejeong Shin, faces fraud charges after officials determined that her paperwork was false.
Shin’s arrest came about four years after a man in his 20s posed as a high school student and was the best player on his campus’s basketball team. That man, Sidney Gilstrap-Portley, later received six years’ probation after he pleaded guilty to records tampering and indecency involving sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl who was a student at the school where he enrolled, reports in the news media said.
