Luke Winn of SI.com has written an incredible story about the journey of Skal Labissiere to the Kentucky Basketball roster.
But of course, with all the rumors floating around about Labissiere’s eligibility issues, here is an excerpt that focuses on just that.
At the center of this situation is Gerald Hamilton and the conflicting opinions over whether he and Reach Your Dream are doing the Lord’s work of bettering a student-athlete’s life (as he and Labissiere assert) or using a prospect to leverage donations to a 501(c)(3) charity. According to one college coach who recruited Labissiere, but did not sign him, Hamilton controlled access to the extent that “you were not allowed to talk to Skal, and the only way you could know he liked you was if he liked your Instagrams.” The coach also told SI that he was asked by an NCAA investigator, in 2015, if Hamilton had requested money for Reach Your Dream. (The coach’s answer was no.) This came in the wake of a November 2014 allegation by a former Memphis AAU coach, Keith Easterwood, who told CBSSports.com that Hamilton had called him in 2012 and asked, “How can I make money off of a basketball player?”
Hamilton refused to comment at the time but told SI in June that he has a text message exchange proving Easterwood was the one who’d asked the damning question. Hamilton says that when he showed their text exchange to Kentucky’s compliance staff, “they almost started laughing, and said, ‘This is it? Are you serious?’ They said we were fine.”
Hamilton and his wife declined SI’s requests to see the texts, on the grounds that they don’t want to fuel more controversy. Easterwood says that after he provided information to the NCAA, he was asked not to talk publicly about Hamilton. Calipari said on Aug. 1 that he is confident Labissiere will be cleared to play.
If they were trying to cash in, the Hamiltons say, they would’ve accepted the pitch from Ole Miss. The Rebels’ coach, Andy Kennedy, had offered Hamilton—whose highest coaching experience was as a prep-school assistant—one of the program’s three full-time assistant positions, hoping to net Labissiere in an NCAA-legal package deal. “That was real,” Hamilton says, “but I told them when they offered, I’m going to have to talk to Skal, but if he’s not interested, then we’re just going to keep moving. And that’s what happened.” (Kennedy says he does not recall that conversation with Hamilton.)
You can read the entire article by clicking here.
