Having heard that 13-year-old Little League World Series sensation Mo'Ne Davis is a big UConn women's basketball fan, coach Geno Auriemma took the time to call the star pitcher to congratulate her on leading her team to the U.S. semifinals.
What a thoughtful gesture by Auriemma, right? Well, apparently not everybody thinks so.
Auriemma told the Hartford Courant on Wednesday that a rival school has filed a complaint with the American Athletic Conference that his phone call to Davis constituted a recruiting violation. Under NCAA rules, Division I coaches cannot call a prospect for the first time until their junior year in high school.
"The conversation lasted like two minutes and we hung up," Auriemma told the Courant. "And then I was told a school turned us in for a recruiting violation because we are not allowed contact until July 1 before her junior year of high school. ... That's the world that we live in."
That a rival school would twist an innocent good deed into a nefarious attempt to get a recruiting edge is a sad commentary on the mistrust in college athletics.
First of all, Auriemma's call may not have even been a violation by the letter of the law since the NCAA defines a prospect as a student who has started classes in ninth grade. Davis is beginning eighth grade this month.
Secondly, it's highly unlikely Auriemma was violating the spirit of the law either. Though Davis does play basketball and dreams of starring for UConn someday, Auriemma told the Courant neither he nor anyone he knows has seen Davis play before.
Ultimately, a petty complaint like this corroborates a few widely believed theories: Coaches are paranoid about every conceivable edge in recruiting, Auriemma is not well-liked among some of his coaching peers and his rivals will go to extreme lengths to try to knock him off his pedestal.
Hopefully the accusing coach gets revealed before this story fades away. It's always helpful to be able to separate the crazy from the competitive, and whoever brought this to the American Athletic Conference's attention is probably more the former than the latter.
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Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at daggerblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
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