The top public school boys basketball program in Prince George’s County, Md., which by any objective measure (or if you just ask me) is the best basketball county in the country, went 0-20 this season. Or anyway the official record book says so now, thanks to punishments doled out in yet another high school sports cheating scandal.
Going by the scoreboard, the boys team at Dr. Henry A. Wise Jr. High School won 18 games this season, more than any other team in the county’s 4A class, for schools with the largest enrollment. Late Monday night, with Wise’s regular season done, the school sent out a self-congratulatory tweet touting their local supremacy. Kudos are quite justifiable, given the mega-rich basketball history of P.G., a suburb that borders Washington, D.C., and has produced NBA first-round talent from Adrian Dantley to Saddiq Bey, with Len Bias, Kevin Durant, Michael Beasley, Victor Oladipo, Markelle Fultz and so many other notable ballers in between.
But the celebration didn’t last long. The following day, the athletics office of Prince George’s County Public Schools delivered some rough news to the Wise community. A letter addressed to Wise principal Taryn Washington said that a county investigation of the basketball program found multiple violations of athletic transfer rules. The PGCPS document, a copy of which was obtained by Defector Media, said the county athletics office started looking into Wise in late January, after officials "received anonymous notification" that "several players" on the Wise roster didn’t meet residency requirements. Investigators subsequently found players that either didn’t live in the Wise district or hadn’t filed the proper paperwork to prove they belonged. Because of what the county deemed "participation of ineligible players based on non-verification of residency," every Wise win had officially been changed to a forfeit loss. The team, according to the document, was now assigned an "0-20 season record." The county athletics office issued a statement with much of the same information that afternoon.
Even with the findings of rule breaking and the related forfeitures, Wise’s season is not over yet. Melissa Nash Mertz, director of compliance and communications for the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association (MPSSAA), the sanctioning body that oversees the state basketball championships, told Defector on Tuesday that every public high school in Maryland qualifies for the state tournament. So Wise, suddenly winless and with a cloud of fraud hovering over their heads, still has a shot at glory.
The penalty, however, turned the 4A bracket for P.G. County schools upside down. The forfeits gave every team that lost to Wise this year an extra win (or two for county division rivals), and Wise went from a No. 1 seed to the lowest in the county. Wise is likely the best team ever placed at the bottom of a bracket in the state tournament’s history.
The county did not announce if any players from Wise’s roster will be removed from the team because of the rules violations. Earl Hawkins, director of the athletics office of Prince George’s County Public Schools, did not respond to Defector’s request for comment.
There is at least one personnel casualty, though: Wise head coach Louis Wilson is done for the season. In an interview with WUSA9 after the forfeits were made public, Wilson said he’d been suspended. He said one student had been deemed ineligible, not the "several" cited in the PGCPS letter to principal Washington, and that the student had been "vetted through the athletic department" at the beginning of the season.
Wilson, who earned his 700th career win in 2020, is a hoops legend in the region. By my count (based on records from MaxPreps), he had notched 787 career wins in 38 years of coaching at several schools in the county before this season’s victories were taken away. According to his bio in the P.G. school system’s Hall of Fame, Wilson has won one public school state championship and four private school national championships. The private titles came at Riverdale Baptist, where Wilson’s best-known player was a young Michael Beasley, who went on to become an NCAA All-American and have an 11-year NBA career.
The apparent flouting of residency and transfer rules by the Wise basketball program reminded me of a very short story told to me years ago by Pete Strickland, a star at DeMatha Catholic High School in the 1970s who became a coach after his playing career. He told me the story during a very long discussion of the otherworldly focus on basketball found among the county’s youngsters and their families. Strickland recalled a scene he’d encountered while on a recruiting trip to an AAU tournament at P.G.’s Suitland High School when he was an assistant at North Carolina State and tasked by then-head coach Sidney Lowe, another P.G. product, to land some county bounty for the Wolfpack.
"I walk into the gym, and there’s a little kid wearing a letter jacket that said 'Under 10 National Champions'," Strickland said. "That just stuck with me. The parents there have so much invested in their kids and basketball"
Wise, which would have had a first-round bye were it not for the forfeits, will open its run for a Maryland state championship—and go for its first official win of the season—Friday night against P.G. County rival Eleanor Roosevelt.
