Commit to us. Choose us. We will change your life. We will make you a better adult. We will fulfill your dreams.
That’s the message high school athletes are given when they’re being recruited for collegiate sports, a stressful and lengthy process that is often portrayed by the school doing the pitching as the most vital decision the young person will ever make.
But what happens when the school breaks its promise? When it severs the commitment? When it leaves the recruit who has invested their future in the school hanging?
That’s the challenge some athletes who planned to go to Stanford are wrestling with, after the school’s decision to unceremoniously drop 11 varsity sports.
“It is so frustrating,” said Luke McFall, a senior at Amador Valley High in Pleasanton.
“Devastating,” said Hunter Dickey, a junior college transfer from Orange Coast College.
Both young men held dreams of playing volleyball for Stanford. While both were shocked by Stanford’s decision to eliminate its distinguished volleyball program, they responded in different ways.
Dickey, who had already used two years of eligibility in junior college, chose to follow through with his decision to attend Stanford. He was recently in Texas training with the team in a “camp” organized and arranged by the players. The team is cleared to return to campus this weekend and hopes to play one final season this spring, if the pandemic allows.
Dickey knows how rare his status is — you have to go back 40 years to find another J.C. transfer into the program.
“I feel the decision (to drop the sport) was terrible, but this is where I need to be personally,” said Dickey, who burst into tears when he heard Stanford’s decision to cut volleyball last July. “But if I was a high schooler and had committed and then had to pivot, I couldn’t imagine it.”
That’s the position McFall finds himself in. Stanford, where his mother Lisa was an undergraduate, was a long-time dream for him. When he grew 11 inches between age 12 and 15 and began getting noticed by collegiate volleyball programs, it became a realistic goal.
A lot of schools were interested, but he let them all know that Stanford was his first choice. Many top schools stopped recruiting him, needing to focus their efforts on players who were available.
“I saw some opportunities pass by,” McFall said. “I knew it was a bit of a gamble.”
But last March, when the coronavirus began to close everything down, McFall’s world seemed to open up. Coach John Kosty called him and told him he wanted him to play for Stanford and extended an offer of a partial scholarship. McFall was thrilled. His future was set. He received the application and was told to fill it out and submit it when he got his spring grades, which were stellar.
He waited and waited to hear about his admittance and was told the delayed response was likely due to the pandemic. But then on the morning of July 8, a coach from a different school who had hoped to recruit McFall called him to see if he’d heard the news: Stanford was dropping men’s volleyball.
And McFall was left scrambling.
“I felt like I was completely starting over again,” McFall said. “It had been a very long, tiring process.”
His mother, and formerly proud Stanford alum Lisa McFall, was stunned.
“It was traumatic and shocking,” she said. “The way they did it and have conducted themselves since, I’m so disgusted with them. It’s not the Stanford that I thought I knew. To say they exhausted all possible actions is a lie. They never told anyone this was an issue or gave any teams the opportunity to raise an endowment and now they’re not engaging or explaining.”
McFall, who will graduate from high school this spring, has had to change his plans. Since almost every program he was interested in already had filled its slots, he is taking a gap year. He hopes to get an internship and possibly play in a league in the Netherlands next winter. Then, he plans to attend to Princeton and hopes that, once he is admitted, he will secure a spot on the volleyball team.
Ken Shibuya, the longtime Stanford assistant men’s volleyball coach who handles much of the recruiting, is crushed for the players he has wooed to Stanford, selling them on the university’s perfect blend of athletics and academics, its once-in-a-lifetime experience. He is left wondering not only about his own future, but the future of the young men he asked to commit to Stanford.
“It’s been a tremendous blow,” Shibuya said. “It’s devastating.
“I know I’m not to blame, but I feel like I’ve betrayed them.”
Jeremy Jacobs is a Stanford volleyball alumnus who has been acting as a spokesman for the campaign to save the team (all 11 sports have been actively fundraising: to date more than $7 million has been pledged to save men’s volleyball).
“One of the things we find most alarming about the decision is Stanford abruptly broke its commitment to current athletes, incoming recruits and their families,” Jacobs said. “For these athletes, where they choose to go to college is a major decision in their lives.”
Dickey, now a member of the team, is holding on to a shred of hope that the campaign to reinstate volleyball will be successful, and the university will reverse its decision.
“We’re going to fight this thing,” he said. “We can be a testament to what resiliency looks like.”
Stanford’s broken promises to recruits extends beyond the individual sports that are being eliminated. One source with a child being recruited by several schools in a different sport, said that the negative recruiting has spilled into the Cardinal’s other supposed “safe” sports. If Stanford can break its promises to those kids, the rumbling goes, how can they be trusted to fulfill a promise to you?
Lisa McFall will continue to work to save the program, of which her son will not be a part.
“This has been such a violation of everything I learned at Stanford about questioning authority and making the change you want to see in the world; things Stanford claims to instill in its population,” she said. “I really want Stanford to do the right thing.
“If not, I’m done with them.”
Ann Killion is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: akillion@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @annkillion
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