Last night, while I was on reading my Twitter timeline, I noticed a tweet about the UCLA Basketball program. It was a Sports Illustrated report that went behind the scenes of the program and found out there was a 'drug' problem. At first, I thought this was going to shatter the program and there would have to be sanctions against the team that would affect them for a couple of years. The report wasn't going to be made available until this morning, so I had to wait to read it.
I checked my twitter timeline again, right before I went to sleep and noticed this tweet from Bryan Fischer:
That was good news because I thought it was going to be worse than the initial report.
If you would like to read the entire story click the link below:
This story appears in the March 5, 2012 issue of Sports Illustrated.
On the evening of Nov. 6, 2007, legendary former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden spoke to about 600 Bruins student-athletes and coaches. The occasion was the debut of The Wooden Academy, a seminar series in which former UCLA athletes and coaches returned to campus to describe how the tenets from Wooden's Pyramid of Success had helped them in college or life.
Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/magazine/02/28/ucla/index.html#ixzz1nnTElajG
To sum up the whole story:
Ben Howland is an idiot and let certain things go too far. College students acted like college students by going to parties and drinking when they were told not to do so by their coaches. Reeves Nelson was a main problem for the UCLA program and Howland should have kicked him off the team a year earlier. Howland let Nelson get away with almost anything. It's pretty much stuff that a UCLA basketball fan like myself knew already. Sports classes at
sports management colleges can teach you why athletes have significantly higher rates of heavy drinking than their non-athlete peers.
I find it ironic that Reeves Nelson made the cover of SI a couple months ago.
Thanks to
Sam Strong, a UCLA student and intern at
Grantland, for keeping me up to date on the whole situation last night.
