Thanks a lot, Twitter, for sending me down another rabbit hole. I could be working on any number of things, including my transitions from guitar to keyboard and vice versa on the Better Than Ezra classic Good. (If you want to know where we’re performing, let me know.)
If you don’t know of the women’s soccer angle on the big college bribery scandal, perhaps in mourning that a star of the great show SportsNight is caught up in all this, check out the story linked here:
I responded the only way I can think of — a bad joke about Mallory Pugh leaving UCLA early. (Hey, Isackson played as many regular-season UCLA games as Pugh did, right?)
That would be Amanda Cromwell, who played with the WNT and in the WUSA before going on a strong coaching career — a long stint at Central Florida, then was hired in 2013 — on my birthday in the spring — at UCLA.
Andrea raises a good question. Off to research I go. After a dead end at PACER, I found that Heavy.com had already embedded the Massachusetts indictment against Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin and many other people, including Bruce and Davina Isackson, parents of former UCLA women’s soccer roster person Lauren Isackson.
This is not the complaint against UCLA men’s coach Jorge Salcedo and other coaches, but we’ll get to that.
The Isackson affidavit
Go to page 172 of Heavy.com’s document (you can also just go to Scribd). That’s page 107 of an affidavit by FBI Special Agent Laura Smith.
According to this …
The Isacksons first tried USC via former USC women’s soccer assistant Laura Janke (more on her later). Former USC women’s soccer coach Ali Khosroshahin (more on him) forwarded Isackson’s info to Salcedo in May 2016. In June, she got into UCLA. Not sure what happened at USC, which was apparently Lauren Isackson’s first choice.
Here’s where the affidavit gets quite serious: “On or about July 7, 2016, CW-1 directed a payment of $100,000 from one of the CWF charitable accounts to a sports marketing company controlled by Salcedo.” Then another to Koshroshahin for $25,000.
(“CW-1” is Cooperating Witness-1, who has agreed to plead guilty to many charges with the hope of obtaining leniency. The affidavit stresses that his information has been corroborated many other ways, including wiretaps and emails.)
Cromwell is not mentioned in any of this.
The Salcedo indictment
PACER records show a case was opened and terminated against Salcedo in California on March 12. Lawyers can better explain what happened, but in any case, everything is taking place in Massachusetts. I mention the California indictment only because the FBI agent who signed a warrant here is named Diamond Outlaw. Seriously. His or her handwriting is worse than mine.
Anyway … on March **5**, a sealed indictment was filed in Massachusetts against Salcedo, Khosroshahin, Janke and 10 others. The case is District Court 1:19-cr-10081-IT-11.
I love legal documents’ need to state the obvious: “ACT, Inc. … administers the ACT exam, a standardized test that is widely used, etc.” All of the schools involved are listed as “highly selective” except San Diego, which is “selective.”
Khosroshahin is identified as USC’s head women’s soccer coach until November 2013. At the outset, it doesn’t say how he has been employed since. Janke is identified as a former USC assistant coach through January 2014. Again, what was she doing after that?
Janke is accused of creating a “falsified athletic profile” on behalf of “Yale Applicant 1” in November 2017.
Quote 1:
55. In a subsequent email, Singer instructed JANKE to add to the profile that Yale Applicant 1 had been on the “JR National Development Team in China,” noting, “we are saying she got hurt this past spring, so was not recruited till now as she got her release late summer.”
Now over to USC. The date is not immediately specified.
62. In exchange for these payments, JANKE and KHOSROSHAHIN designated four children of Singer’s clients as recruits for the USC women’s soccer team, despite the fact that none of those children played competitive soccer.
It wasn’t just soccer. Janke is accused of helping a prospective USC rower with no rowing experience in September 2016.
The UCLA section repeats a trail we saw earlier, also in 2016 — Khosroshanin takes falsified profile, hands it over to Salcedo, and a soccer player who hasn’t played elite soccer gets into UCLA.
There’s a brief mention of another accusation from October 2018 involving a men’s soccer recruit who hadn’t played competitive soccer.
Salcedo and Janke are not mentioned again.
Cromwell is not mentioned at all.
Ranting Soccer Dad 
From everything I’ve read, the athletic recruiting part of this scandal involves mainly female athletes. I’m not smart enough to know the impact of Title IX regulations, but is there an incentive for school administrators to close an eye to female recruitment violations? If a coach says I need 25 recruits for my team, when he really only needs 20, does it benefit the school to list 5 extra recruits which will never play? I can see this being especially true with crew teams, who can have as many female members as a football team. I’m not saying school administrators knew that coaches were bribed, but I don’t see how the schools themselves cannot be complicit in this scandal. If anything comes out of this, I hope that it will hold the schools more accountable for all recruits.
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