Earlier Tuesday, Prep Rally wrote about disturbing developments in West Virginia, where a phony basketball academy drew top hoops prospects from around the world only to have them live in squalor without food until the teens were discovered by local authorities. Now one of the players who was part of the West Virginia Prep Academy fraud is speaking up about the fake school and its fraudulent purveyor, Daniel Hicks.
In the first interview with a West Virginia Prep Academy player since the alleged school’s massive fraud was uncovered by the Charleston Gazette and other West Virginia media sources, Baltimore guard Corey Saunders, pictured above, spoke with Prep Rally and detailed the full extent of the deplorable conditions in which players who signed up to play for West Virginia Prep Academy were living in.
“We had no idea what was going on,” Saunders told Prep Rally in a telephone interview. “Everyone started figuring out [that West Virginia Prep was a fraudulent enterprise] as we were going along. It was like ‘Why is [Hicks] leaving us here?’ It was like he was stalling us out for time. We would bunch up in cars to get to public gyms because we never got the 16-passenger vans we were promised.
“The hardest part about it was barely eating. … Waking up, not knowing what you were going to eat the next day. [Hicks] wasn’t taking care of us right, that was hard.”
According to Saunders, the 20 teens who shared a three-bedroom apartment had to scramble to find all their own food after the first day they arrived in West Virginia. A Baltimore native who spent his senior year at Upper Marlboro (Md.) Frederick Douglass High, Saunders said that the only time food was provided to the players was when the mother of another player from Georgia drove up to the players’ apartment after becoming worried about her son’s health. Shocked that they hadn’t eaten, she went out to the store and bought groceries for the players that lasted a little more than a day.
By that point, Hick’s elaborate scam was beginning to unravel, though Saunders provided information that shines new light into precisely how the former New Mexico State basketball player was able to convince players from across the country — not to mention France, the U.K. and Sudan — that West Virginia Prep was the best chance they had to gain major exposure on the U.S. basketball recruiting circuit. If there was any question that Hicks was incredibly persuasive, just consider one of the top names he landed at West Virginia Prep: Highly touted point guard Jaylen Beckham, from Lexington, Kent.
Saunders was among a small handful of students who was drawn to Hicks’ enterprise directly. When he was looking for a school at which to spend a post-graduate year, Saunders was attracted by the early season schedule published on West Virginia Prep’s website. After contacting Hicks, Saunders briefly visited his offices in South Charleston and was shown a prospective 2010-11 season schedule that included the most powerful teams in the country, Oak Hill (Va.) Academy, Findlay Prep (Nev.) Academy and Brewster (N.H.) Academy among them.
That, combined with Hicks’ persuasive ability to convince players that they would receive significant playing time in the national limelight, convinced Saunders that West Virginia Prep was his best opportunity. The guard also convinced his former Frederick Douglass teammate Dwayne Brewer to join him in South Charleston.