NCAA classifies 7th graders as prospects

[BillyMac]

I coached junior high school/middle school girls basketball for over twenty-five years. One year, a local university got a new womens coach, and she was trying to get local kids fired up about her program, and attend her games. Her team was very low profile at the time. We were one of the last junior high schools (grades 7-9) at the time in Connecticut. Most other schools were true middle schools (grades 6-8). As a team we were invited to attend her game for free, and to participate in a foul shooting contest at halftime. Before halftime, the site director discovered that we had ninth graders on our team. You should have seen the look on her face when she found that we were not a true middle school. She left us for several minutes, and when she came back, she had the athletic director with her. Only our seventh and eighth graders were allowed to participate in the foul shooting contest, not our ninth graders, and a few days after this, I received some paperwork that I was asked to sign explaining what had happened from my viewpoint. They had decided to self-report to the NCAA.