Barton AD claims improprieties are rampant in Jayhawk Conference

WICHITA, Kan. -- The fraudulent use of work-study money to bypass Kansas Jayhawk Community College Conference rules banning full scholarships is widespread in the league and has not stopped despite the convictions of eight people at Barton County Community College, the school's new athletic director said Tuesday.

"The attitude is that if the feds come in and start investigating other schools, it will change. Right now everybody has the attitude it is just Barton and nobody is going to come after them," said athletic director Kurt Kohler. "The entire conference needs to wake up and make some changes so that the entire conference is clean."

His remarks came one day after two more former Barton County coaches were sentenced to probation for their roles in the academic and financial aid scandal at the college.

The defense attorney for former basketball coach Ryan Wolf -- the coach whose case started the federal investigation at Barton -- told reporters that the fraudulent use of federal and campus work-study programs to provide athletes room and board is "the rule rather than the exception" in the league.

Prosecutors say the coaches used funds from the work-study programs to pay athletes for work they never performed so the players could pay for room and board. Conference rules prohibit giving student-athletes money to cover such costs.

Secretly recorded tapes

Government prosecutors have 163 secretly recorded cassette tapes of phone calls from various coaches in the conference who called Wolf wanting to know if they were going to be discussed, said attorney Roger Falk.

Jim Cross, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office in Wichita, has declined to comment on the phone recording claims and refused to say whether prosecutors were investigating other colleges.

Since the investigation broke, BCCC and perhaps other schools have instituted multiple checks to make sure similar abuses don't recur, Kohler said.

But some Jayhawk schools are not worrying about it "until it ends up knocking on their front door," Kohler said.

Kohler took over as athletic director at Barton County in June after his predecessor, Neil Elliott, was indicted and later pleaded guilty in the scandal.

Kohler said that when he was a coach at Missouri Western State University, he recruited players from the Jayhawk conference. While he never recruited any Barton County players, he talked to a lot of players from other Jayhawk junior colleges who told him of similar work-study practices at their schools.

"I know coaches are looking at their whole careers, their livelihoods taken away if some of those issues come out," Kohler said. "If you have 163 tapes, it is probably widespread."

Bryce Roderick, commissioner of the Jayhawk conference, said Tuesday he does not know of any other institution in the league involved in something like Barton County. He said he is not aware of any federal investigation of similar practices at other colleges.

"We are getting work-study reports from presidents of the colleges -- hoping to head off anything that might not be appropriate on that type of thing," he said.