The University Interscholastic League took severe measures to punish the Oak Cliff Faith Family Academy girls basketball program and its coaches Wednesday, preventing a super team built with 18 transfers from competing for a state title this season.
The state executive committee suspended Faith Family head coach Andrea Robinson and assistant coaches Kadi Creel and Jordan Jones from all UIL activities for two years for recruiting violations. That is one year short of the maximum penalty.
The Dallas charter school was banned from the 2024-25 postseason after being found guilty of recruiting violations, a lack of transparency and withholding information.
“There needs to be a signal sent, and I think it’s appropriate,” UIL state executive committee chairman Mike Motheral said.
The coaches’ suspensions will be followed by two years of probation, and they were also given a public reprimand. Faith Family was issued three years’ probation and a public reprimand.
The rulings came two days before girls basketball teams across the state can begin playing games.
“It has been said time and time again, not only by the panel, but also the administration at Faith Academy, that we recognize that the optics of this are terrible,” SEC committee member James Colbert Jr. said. “In my years of being in education and being a former coach and administrator, it is no accident when you have 18 students transfer to one program in one year. That doesn’t sit well with me.”
Faith Family and Robinson declined to comment on the UIL rulings. Robinson said during the hearing that she had never been accused of any form of recruiting previously during her 26 years of coaching.
Dallas ISD, which has the other seven schools in District 13-5A other than Faith Family, declined to comment. Dallas ISD was in charge of the local district executive committee meeting Oct. 17 when Faith Family and its coaches were originally found guilty of recruiting violations, a lack of transparency and withholding information before the matter was passed along to the UIL to decide the punishment.
Austin-based attorney Tiger Hanner, who represented Faith Family at the SEC hearing, said no recruiting took place, but he testified that some of the transfers were likely for athletic purposes, which is a violation of UIL rules.
“The numbers, whether it’s 17, 18, 19, they’re shocking,” Hanner said. “We are talking about student-athletes that are some of the best basketball players in the country. To sit here and pretend like that some of these girls at least didn’t come to Faith Family for athletic purposes would be naive. There is no question. They saw a coach like Coach Robinson and the staff she has assembled and they want to go be a part of that.”
But he said the issue at hand Wednesday was recruiting, not player eligibility.
“If you go through all of what is claimed to be evidence, there is not one piece of anything that shows this coach contacted a kid, this coach recruited a kid, this coach enticed a kid,” Hanner said. “None of that exists.”
At the DEC meeting Oct. 17, evidence was presented accusing Creel of having impermissible contact with a player and her parents at an AAU game and of giving her a bag with a Faith Family shirt and other school items. On Wednesday, the assistant coach denied giving anything to a student who had not already enrolled at Faith Family.
Jones, the other assistant, also denied trying to recruit a player from Lincoln, saying she reached out on social media only on behalf of college coaches who wanted information about the athlete.
“No other contact with that player had been made. The minute that post was up, it was taken down immediately,” Robinson said. “There was no intent of any form of recruiting.”
The hearing revealed that 18 girls basketball players have transferred to Faith Family, not 13 as originally mentioned in the 13-5A DEC meeting Oct. 17. Faith Family didn’t have any girls basketball transfers last season, and testimony at the SEC meeting showed that the ones this year started to come in only after Robinson, a four-time state champion, was hired from national powerhouse DeSoto and started work at Faith Family on April 4.
“With respect to recruiting, not only was it 18 athletes, but the level and caliber of athletes who went there and the timing of it is disturbing for me,” Colbert said.
Robinson had said in the DEC meeting that she saw no red flags, but Motheral said Wednesday that “when you’ve got as many kids moving into your high school as you do, those are red flags.”
“I can own the numbers. I can see the optics in that,” Robinson said. “We are a school of choice, and we are a charter school. We are open enrollment, so for me, being a school of choice, it did not seem to be an issue.”
Lack of timeliness
Faith Family had 15 girls basketball players on its roster last season and only two are playing for the school this season, both on the junior varsity, athletic director Marcus Canonico said Wednesday.
The state executive committee asked Canonico how Faith Family was able to persuade Robinson — one of the most successful coaches in the state — to come to a program that only had a couple of athletes returning.
Canonico struggled to come up with an answer before saying, “We are good salesmen.”
He added, “As a school district, we have a lot to offer in the area. We have a lot to offer our coaches. We don’t give them company cars or anything like that or send them on vacations, but I think being in south Dallas, it’s a talent-rich area. We told Coach Robinson we wanted to build a program. We’ve done that on the boys side and now we want to focus and try to do that with our girls basketball.”
The SEC hearing featured testimony about Faith Family’s inability to submit previous athletic participation forms for its transfers in a timely manner, sometimes taking months to do so, and it was pointed out that PAPFS for five of the transfers still haven’t been sent to their previous schools to fill out. A student has to have a clean PAPF to be able to compete in athletics, and an administrator or coach at the previous school must be given the opportunity to indicate if they think the transfer was for athletic purposes.
UIL athletic director Ray Zepeda asked Canonico why the school didn’t respond to the UIL’s request in August for a list of its girls basketball players, and Canonico said he didn’t have an answer.
Zepeda added that the athletic director had told the UIL in an Aug. 21 email that every transfer had been submitted into the UIL portal and that the school would enter players 24 hours after enrollment to create transparency, but that wasn’t the case.
“I find it amazing that you haven’t been able to comply,” said Colbert, who called the lack of timeliness “absolutely ridiculous.”
What’s next for the players?
The transfers included four players ranked among the top 100 recruits in the nation. Two of those — five-star junior forward Amari Byles and four-star junior combo guard Amayah “Sunshine” Garcia — played for Robinson at DeSoto the past two seasons and finished as the Class 6A state runner-up in 2023.
The other big-name players who transferred to Faith Family were four-star Alabama pledge Joy Egbuna from Mansfield Lake Ridge, four-star sophomore point guard Finley Chastain from national champion Montverde in Florida and sisters Gianna, Milania, Natalia and Nadia Jordan from Southlake Carroll. Freshman Kelenna Ozumba, an elite recruit in the Class of 2028 who already has an offer from Ole Miss, transferred to Faith Family instead of staying in Allen.
The DEC has not met to determine the varsity eligibility of the Faith Family transfers for this season.
“If they transferred for athletic purposes, they are going to be deemed ineligible,” Hanner, Faith Family’s attorney, said Wednesday. “There is a process for all of that. We’re going to get to that, and many of those student-athletes are not going to be allowed to participate in varsity athletics.”
If ruled eligible, the students could still play for Faith Family, but the team wouldn’t be able to advance to the postseason.
One option is to return to their previous school, where they could play if they are ruled ineligible at Faith Family.
UIL rules state that a student who transfers for an impermissible reason is still eligible at the school where varsity eligibility was first established, without the need of a waiver. A student must reenroll in the school within 30 days of being found ineligible at the transfer school.
Another option for the students is to transfer to a private school. But the TAPPS transfer deadline for the winter season was Tuesday, so they would have to appeal to the organization’s executive board.
UIL crackdown
Robinson, who won two state titles apiece at Fort Worth Dunbar and DeSoto and has 584 career wins, isn’t the first multi-state championship coach to be suspended by the UIL. In 2019, former Duncanville girls basketball coach and eight-time state champion Cathy Self-Morgan was issued a three-year suspension from coaching after the UIL ruled that she was guilty of recruiting violations when five-star recruit and McDonald’s All-American Deja Kelly transferred from San Antonio Johnson to Duncanville.
This also isn’t the first time that a much publicized basketball program received a postseason ban. In October 2022, the UIL banned the 12-time state champion Duncanville girls from the playoffs for one season and suspended then-head coach LaJeanna Howard for the rest of that school year because of a recruiting violation.
At that same time, the UIL stripped the Duncanville boys basketball team of its 2022 6A state title after ruling it used an ineligible player, and it suspended head coach David Peavy for one year.
The UIL is cracking down on recruiting and transfer violations after saying this summer that as many as 15,000 athletes could transfer to Texas high schools this school year, either changing schools within the state or moving in from out of state.
In February, Andrew Cameron, who had been the offensive coordinator for five-time state champion North Shore, was suspended from all UIL activities for three years. Cameron admitted he personally recruited players from other schools while head coach Willie Gaston was suspended for the first two district games of the 2024 season for negligence.
In March, the UIL suspended former McAllen Rowe boys basketball coach Jose Yebra for three years for school violations involving recruiting after it was found that Yebra’s team played an ineligible player during the season.
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