The university blunder of $ 252 that leaves two Spanish tennis players in the US without trophies

Laura Moreno Martinez (Murcian) and Ana Yrazusta Acosta (from Las Palmas) are 24 years old and have dedicated a large part of their youth to tennis. “We have taken it very seriously,” Yrazusta acknowledges in conversation with this newspaper. The two coincided at the University of Massachusetts in 2015: the best way to grow athletically was to get a sports and academic scholarship, and there they found her: she covered one hundred percent of their expenses (except for trips to Spain) to study Tourism Management (Laura) and Sports Administration (Ana).

UMass (as it is popularly known) is not one of the universities with the longest sports tradition in the United States, but its women’s tennis team progressed during those years and achieved a memorable triumph in 2017: the Atlantic 10 Conference (A10), which gives access to the national tennis championship. Today these two Spanish tennis players live again in their regions of origin. They are outraged. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the powerful association that organizes most college sports competitions in the United States, has removed three years of victories from the women’s tennis team (and the men’s basketball team) due to a minor administrative error: the improper payment of $ 252 to two tennis players – they didn’t know anything – to pay for a landline phone at home in the 2015-16 season.

“It changed our lives”

“It is very difficult for someone outside the team to understand the effort and the tears what is behind that conference title “, says Moreno:” For me, personally, it has been one of the greatest achievements of my life, because we had to go through a lot as a team that year, to any colleague who shared that experience it changed his life. This is totally unfair. “

At first glance, indeed, a minor and unique clerical error it seems an absurd reason to disable three years of work and success (this help, unknown to the players, did not grant apparent competitive advantages). However, the NCAA has acted swiftly: when this month an internal audit discovered that in the 2015/2016 season two of the tennis players (Brittany Collens y Anna Woosley) had mistakenly received those $ 252 extra ($ 126 each) On behalf of his university, the body not only fined UMass with 5,000 dollars, but also stripped the two teams of their victories between 2014 and 2017; among them, the title of champions of the Atlantic 10 Conference, the most important trophy of all.

The tennis team has opened a petition on Change.org that has more than 4,000 adherents, and its story has reached ESPN The The Boston Globe, the newspaper where the events narrated in the film took place Spotlight, which dedicated one of the most widely read articles this month to “NCAA hypocrisy.” “I know it is difficult to understand”, explains Ana Yrazusta to The confidential, “but that help was to be able to hook a landline phone to the wall. It doesn’t make the slightest senseIt was a clerical error due to the fact that they no longer lived on campus. It took us a lot to win that conference title. It is absolutely disproportionate! “

Cheating accusations

In the dark ocean of social networks, tennis players have begun to receive messages and accusations of cheating. The University has acknowledged the mistake and hired a new financial controller to avoid mistakes in the future, but qualifies the punishment as “inappropriate and disproportionate.” Meanwhile, former UMass players are calling for a revocation of the sanction and profound reforms in the NCAA organizing committee.

Brittany Collens, professional on the ITF circuit since dropping out of college in 2017, he told the Boston Globe he heard the news in the car and thought it was a joke. She has been the visible face of the initiative on Change.org: “Punishment sends the message that we cheated, that we did something wrong. […] We realized that it is a more serious matter, in which the NCAA has failed to protect its student-athletes. It is certainly not the first time, but we hope it will be the last. “

Ana and Laura have decided to collaborate from Spain. “As a team and tennis players that we are, we have no fault. And those two players had no idea. Not the slightest idea of ​​having received that money. punish the administration. We are tennis players, we play tennis, nothing else. “