Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/02/10/take-a-look-at-the-bogus-athle.html
…
1 Like
Did they simply copy the resume from another athlete? Identity theft?
4 Likes
Even if this was completely legitimate, it is so deeply puzzling that such a list of accomplishments is supposed to qualify one for a position at an institution of higher learning.
35 Likes
That’s my first thought. Those two corner-cutters would put in as little effort as possible. Either they ganked the CV from someone else or (more likely) their grifting “consultant” Rick Singer did it for them.
8 Likes
If memory serves, two members of the USC athletic administration ran a racket where an external (but totally still in bed with them) for-profit ‘recruitment advising consultancy’ was paid outlandish sums by parents to craft the faked records which were then provided to USC. The insiders at USC would then ‘believe’ the company’s impressive-but-not-attention-grabbingly-outlandish faked records, and officially ‘recruit’ the student, thereby basically guaranteeing admission and a veneer of deniability for the USC racketeers. It’s just so… dumb and pedestrian.
10 Likes
who’s the coxswain now?
1 Like
The racket was run by the “consultant”, who had confederates in the athletic departments of a number of schools. For various reasons, USC was a favourite target school in the scam. Otherwise, it works as you said. Dumb and pedestrian, but involving a lot of money (tens and in a few cases hundreds of thousands of dollars).
Singer also offered services like an actual smart person to take the standardised tests for the dimwit kid (enabled by a ruse that involved pretending the kid had a learning disability – lovely).
For those who want more background, I recommend season 1 of the Gangster Capitalism podcast.
12 Likes
For what it’s worth, a coxswain doesn’t row, only steers. Generally coxswains are small people, which was probably part of the ruse, since the applicant probably didn’t look like a rower.
That said, being a coxswain requires skill and experience which is critical to practices and races.
9 Likes
I was unaware that awareness is a résumé-worthy skill.
I wonder how many job interviews I didn’t get because of that!
14 Likes
I just applied for a promotion and my #1 skill I listed was awareness. Fingers crossed – I should hear soon!
7 Likes
You actually got several of the jobs but due to your lack of awareness, you never found out. 
12 Likes
No; identity theft would be if Olivia Jade pretended to be that athlete. Copying the resume is just copying.
2 Likes
Holy shit, Head of the Lagoon! I rowed for Serra/ND Crew all four years in high school, starting in 1989, when it was a straight-up Bad News Bears kind of situation. Monica and Larry (and Ed! Hi Ed!) had their work cut out for them to get that team up and running. Looks like they’ve made a hell of a lot of progress.
3 Likes
As a former coxswain, I can confirm that awareness, direction and steering are all important skills to have (they were also important skills that I lacked, but that’s another story). ‘organization’ would be harder to justify as part of the coxswain’s skill-set, but I suppose the point is that she was never going to be asked to justify it. The resume was just window-dressing.
6 Likes
Yep, “awareness, organization, direction, and steering” are good skills, but, as a rower, they’re not what I’d be looking for in a coxswain.
A coxswain is a team member… they are there every morning training with you. They are the coach’s eyes and ears when they are away tending to another boat. They run the drills. During the race, they do the motivation (power 10!), plan the race strategy and the pace over the course, know what their team is capable of and how to extract the most performance. I guess they also steer, but the best ones will see a corpse at 200m and maneuver around it so no one else will see it.
1 Like
But she did claim to be the coxswain of the 8th place finisher at the 2016 Head of the Charles race, among others. Someone else is rightfully the owner of that honor. I wonder how the women who did earn those honors are feeling about this.
1 Like
5 Likes
Sports are considered a proxy for “leadership,” … and guess what leadership is a proxy for
in a survey of white California adults, they generally favor admissions policies that place a high priority on high school grade-point averages and standardized test scores. But when these white people are focused on the success of Asian-American students, their views change.
The white adults in the survey were also divided into two groups. Half were simply asked to assign the importance they thought various criteria should have in the admissions system of the University of California. The other half received a different prompt, one that noted that Asian Americans make up more than twice as many undergraduates proportionally in the UC system as they do in the population of the state.
When informed of that fact, the white adults favor a reduced role for grade and test scores
4 Likes
They’re class and race signifiers. We can’t just let the dirty poors in to pollute the halls of the ruling class finishing schools, but these days you have to put a minimally-credible cover over the classism.
Especially at the upper end, US colleges aren’t about education. They’re about networking and credentialism.
2 Likes
