by Glenn Stout
There are also health concerns: some players arrive in the country without proper immunizations, and their schools never bother to vaccinate them. Mahmadou, Rostand, Franck, and Stefan didn’t receive their mandated shots until they arrived at Lake Wales High.
Those are worst-case scenarios, but the everyday abuses are bad enough. Whether through incompetence, ambition, or, as several international students allege, corruption, schools like Faith Baptist North can leave aspiring athletes out on the street in a foreign land, disillusioned, vulnerable, and illegal.
The Georgia school is rare in that it has precipitated a federal investigation, but as the North Carolina investigation reveals, there are other schools and individuals allegedly abusing the I-20 system, potentially leaving students in deplorable conditions with little or no way out.
“I would try every day to get back in my country,” says Mahmadou. “Because in Georgia, I didn’t go to school. I didn’t sleep good, eat good. Nobody to tell me how I would do. My first plan was to get back to my country. Because I was . . .”
He pauses, struggling to find the word. “Lost.”
As dawn broke over the citrus groves in Lake Wales on April 22, 2016, Lora Watts Donley was in an urgent care office pleading for antibiotics and anything else that would knock out the walking pneumonia the doctor had diagnosed. She felt like hell, but there was no time for coddling a 102.7 degree fever. Lora rarely failed to complete a task, and this one was no different.
It had been more than a year since the four young basketball players, basically homeless in a foreign country, had landed in the Donley home near Lake Wales. Now, Lora was literally reversing their course, taking Mahmadou and Stefan to a junior college showcase in the Atlanta suburb of Norcross, nine hours away.
Things had gone well for the most part in the year since the boys had fled Faith Baptist North. The Donleys took them in because they believe in helping others in need, and because they have the resources to do it. They go to church, and it’s right to share blessings.
David, Lora’s husband, runs a family citrus-growing operation and owns land throughout central Florida. Lora’s family lives nearby and owns a blueberry packing house and floral manufacturing business.
Thanks to the Donleys, the boys were finally living the kind of American life they had seen on television and read about on the Internet. They had their own space in a beautiful home, nice clothes, plenty of food, good schools to attend, and sports teams to play on. The Donleys’ generosity included helping arrange for Stefan’s mother to come to Florida from Serbia to visit her son.
“Those kids lucked out,” says Donna Dunson, the Lake Wales High principal.
But the kids were still witnesses in a federal investigation, allowed in the country as long as investigators found them useful. Homeland Security agents told Lora the investigation could last two years, but nobody knew for certain, and their witness status was set to expire at the end of March 2016. After that, they would be vulnerable, much the way they were in the van the year before, when George Flint claimed to have canceled their I-20s.
Lora and David were keenly attuned to any change in the boys’ behavior, and it was clear that the ordeal they had endured in Georgia—the lack of food, the threats of deportation, the alienation—had taken a toll. The boys were homesick, yet worried about whether they could continue their educations in the U.S. “They were crashing on me, losing morale,” Lora says.
Lora figured the surefire way to keep the boys on track was to find them college scholarships and the I-20s that came with them. That way, even if the government dropped the investigation and no longer needed them as witnesses, they wouldn’t be deported.
Lora had already succeeded with Franck, who had graduated from high school by the time he arrived in Lake Wales and earned a JUCO basketball scholarship from State College of Florida in Bradenton.
For Rostand, Mahmadou, and Stefan, however, time was running out, and tensions were high.
Propped up by antibiotics, massive doses of ibuprofen, and a sackful of vitamins, Lora loaded Stefan and Mahmadou into the SUV along with Stefan’s mother, Lola, and Lora’s daughter, Kaylee, and began the long drive north. The destination: the All-American Showcase, an event for unsigned high school, prep, JUCO, and international prospects.
As they checked into their hotel and the boys registered for the tournament, Lora described her mission in a Facebook post:
✓ Basketball Showcase weekend: must get the boys a scholarship. ✓ Three days of being sick: bed is not an option. ✓ Predawn urgent care trip: 2 shots in my butt and a bag of prescriptions. ✓ 9 hour road trip through a monsoon with fever: we have arrived. ✓ God please send the right people this weekend. You know what everyone has gone through to get here.
Rostand landed in America on October 24, 2014, at exactly 3:35 p.m.; he checked his phone to mark the moment. He arrived with a small suitcase, two pairs of shoes, and an inconspicuous belt bag his mom had given him in which he kept his documents and $150 in cash. But he felt rich. This, he thought, would be the start of a new life, a chance to gain an education in the United States (annual per capita income, $55,230, according to the World Bank) and rise above his station in Cameroon (annual per capita income, $1,350).
Rostand’s first love wasn’t basketball. Soccer mattered more. He grew up playing it, and by the age of 14, a local manager offered to take him to Europe to try out with a professional club. But African kids are well aware that unscrupulous managers have promised soccer contracts in Europe and then discarded the kids with no way for them to get back home.
“My dad said no,” Rostand recalls. “He didn’t want it to happen.”
Basketball in the U.S. was different. “I didn’t think anything could happen like that in the United States—never,” he says. “If you have a chance to go to the United States, you should take it.”
American basketball had bestowed opportunity on dozens of players from Cameroon in the past decade. A guy Rostand knew, Landry Nnoko, was playing at Clemson University on a full scholarship. Joel Embiid was the third overall pick in the 2014 NBA draft. And it was another Cameroonian success story, former UCLA star and NBA veteran Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, who helped pave Rostand’s path to Atlanta that October afternoon.
Rostand shone at Mbah a Moute’s annual summer camp in Cameroon the previous year, earning him an invitation to the NBA’s 2013 Basketball Without Borders Camp in South Africa. Out of 64 players, Rostand says he was among 20 chosen for the all-star game. He met and took a photo with his idol, Cleveland Cavaliers point guard Kyrie Irving, and heard some coaches say he had “a good chance” to play and get an education at a U.S. university.
For nearly a year, though, Rostand heard nothing more. That’s not surprising. In the hunt for international talent, big men are the priority. For whatever reason, the U.S. high school system is producing few quality post players. And those rare top-tier prospects—such as Anthony Davis and Jahlil Okafor—are quickly gobbled up by NCAA powerhouses.
Meanwhile, the non-elite college programs have begun spanning the globe for height, with Africa being a favorite focus. Many prep schools also jumped into the fray, stocking their rosters with tall international players in hopes of moving them up the ladder. But African backcourt prospects are rare.
Rostand didn’t know this, of course, when a Cameroonian teacher who would teach briefly at Faith Baptist North asked him if he would be interested in a scholarship to the new prep school. He leaped at the chance.
The teenager’s American dream lasted about as long as the walk to customs. Officials told him his I-20 wasn’t in their files. For six hours, he waited in the airport, not knowing if they were going to put him right back on a plane to Africa.
When Rostand finally cleared immigration and met his new coach face-to-face, he says Flint turned to a colleague and said, “Really? Look at him. He’s not even tall.”
Not long after, Rostand says Flint demanded $2,000. “I opened my bag and showed
him the full scholarship that I have,” Rostand recalls in his French-accented English. He insisted he wasn’t supposed to pay anything. Flint’s response, according to Rostand: “Okay, that means you want to go back to Cameroon, right?”
Rostand’s parents had all but liquidated their savings for their son’s plane ticket, but the teenager relented. “I was just getting out of the issue with my papers, and I was so afraid,” Rostand says. “I say, ‘Okay, okay, okay. I will give you the money.’ ”
He contacted his family, who somehow rounded up and wired $500, enough to appease Flint. As bad as Rostand’s first day was, his stay in the States was about to get much worse. He was not alone.
Over the past 15 years, dozens of sports-centric prep schools have opened in the U.S. Increasingly, these “Bootleg Prep” schools, as one coach calls them, seek to fill seats by attracting top athletes from overseas, who in turn attract less skilled players and regular students who are willing to pay hefty tuition.
The goal is to become the elite Montverde Academy, near Orlando, Florida, which helped propel Australia’s Ben Simmons to the top of the NBA draft board and which has a significant number of international students paying the annual boarding school tuition of $49,600.
While Montverde was founded in 1912 and has a solid academic reputation to go along with its top-level sports program, Faith Baptist North was the new school on the block in the summer of 2014. And to the four federal witnesses, it looked like a perfect opportunity.
The photos in the Faith Baptist North web brochure were the clincher. “It was beautiful,” says Stefan. “When [Flint] said that he offers me a full ride and he sent me the pictures of the ‘campus,’ it didn’t take my family long to say yes.”
The boys did whatever it took to get there, and Flint obliged them. In addition to offering them full scholarships, Flint supplied them with I-20s signed by officials from Faith Baptist’s south campus in Ludowici. After the African teacher helped recruit Rostand, the player headed for the U.S. embassy in Yaounde with his I-20 in hand. He was interviewed by officials there and granted a student visa.
Franck came via a different route. He was already in the U.S., playing at Lee Academy in Maine. But he wasn’t on any college’s recruiting list. Gibbons, a former Division II college coach who had retired in the Stockbridge area, had agreed to help coach at Faith Baptist North in its inaugural season, and he was looking for players on short notice. Gibbons saw potential in a video of Franck, and soon the player was headed south.
Mahmadou had played against Rostand in some Cameroon national tournaments, but he was just learning the game. He was a seven-footer, though, so Faith Baptist North got in touch with him through one of the “handlers” or “recruiters” who help a player find a school, or vice versa, and coordinate the player’s passage to America. The Cameroonian recruiter asked Mahmadou to go to the embassy and get a visa.
It didn’t matter that it was already December and the season was well under way. On December 6, Mahmadou landed at Washington Dulles International Airport, and even though he spoke almost no English, he found his way to a bus station and took a 20-hour ride to Atlanta.
Stefan’s decision was a family affair—and a family sacrifice. His older brother, Filip, was also a good basketball player, but the family could afford to send only one of the boys to the States. The other would have to stay in Belgrade to help with the family business, a café.
At Filip’s insistence, they sent Stefan. “I can never be grateful enough for him giving me the chance to try to succeed in what I love to do,” Stefan says of his brother.
With help from a Belgrade-based recruiting agency, Stefan received his I-20 from Faith Baptist. On July 3, his mom’s birthday, he was on a plane to the U.S. to meet George Flint.
Flint is a stocky, round-faced 42-year-old with an undeniable love of sports, an entrepreneur’s persistence, and, when he wants to talk, a preacher’s eloquence.
In recent years Flint, who now runs a business called Goshen Financial Services, Inc., in suburban Atlanta, has focused on his son’s fledgling basketball career. Flint coached his son’s AAU teams throughout the boy’s teens and kept moving him to different high schools in hopes of helping him land a Division I scholarship.
Jonathan Morgans, an Iraq War veteran, got to know Flint on the AAU circuit. Morgans had coached as an assistant at Faith Baptist in Ludowici in 2012 and ’13, and says Flint frequently discussed taking an even bigger role in his son’s career.
By the spring of 2014, Morgans says Flint started talking about opening a school and surrounding his son with top-flight talent. He asked Morgans for help. In May 2014, Morgans set up a meeting between Flint and his former employers at Faith Baptist’s Ludowici campus.
Flint was interested in starting up a “sister campus” in Atlanta and using Faith Baptist’s certification to issue I-20s to international players. In the previous few years, the Ludowici school had begun to take in foreign students, mostly baseball and basketball players from the Dominican Republic, plus a few from Africa, says Matthew Sellars, the athletic director at Faith Baptist’s south campus and the son of the school’s founder, Pastor Terry Sellars.
“Basically, we had been playing several schools in some national events, and it just seemed like every team we played, the kids on the other team weren’t speaking English,” Matthew Sellars says. “I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ And so I started talking to some of my coaching friends, and they said, ‘Yes, well we started getting exchange students.’ . . . So we started it here.”
Now, Flint offered a chance to expand that mission. “I didn’t know Flint from Adam,” Matthew Sellars says, but he introduced him to his dad. “And they kind of hit it off because [Flint] was pretending he was a pastor and all this Christian aspect.”
While Matthew Sellars says Flint “was trying to do something good,” he says his dad was taken advantage of. “He is trusting until obviously you bury him,” he says. “He wants to be friendly, and he got conned.” Pastor Terry Sellars declined to comment for this story, referring Bleacher Report to his son.
Soon, Flint and the Sellars family were in business together. It didn’t matter that Flint had no school building, no curriculum, no teachers, no place to house students, no experience running a prep school, and no SEVP certification. It didn’t matter that it was May, and he wanted to open the school in September. He had an AAU team, and he had access to I-20s. In a few months, he had eager teenagers from around the world coming to play for him.
In July and August, Stefan practiced with Flint’s AAU team, played some games, and heard assurances from Flint that the school was going to be great as athletes trickled in. But when it came time for school to open, classes weren’t held at the gleaming, whitewashed campus in the brochures.
Instead, Flint leased the gym, playing field, and some classroom space behind New Hope Christian Ministries in Stockbridge. While football and basketball practices started on the site in August, classes did not. “They said school starts September 1,” Stefan says, “and like three weeks passed, and we still didn’t go to school.”
There was no permanent lodging either. In the fall, several basketball players, including Stefan, stayed at Flint’s house. The rest bunked at what was then an EconoLodge in Stockbridge. “He populated like half the hotel,” Stefan says. Flint’s house and the motel were 30-minute drives to the makeshift Conyers “campus” at New Hope, longer when traffic was bad.
When classes finally started in late September, players shuttled between their lodging and the gym in a cast-off yellow school bus Flint had somehow picked up from Canada.
The student body formed a motley crew: more than two dozen basketball players, most from overseas; 35 or 40 football players, mostly American, but including Chidi Valentine-Okeke, a Nigerian-born blue-chip offensive line prospect who now plays at LSU; a couple of Serbian soccer players, who, when they realized Faith Baptist North wouldn’t field a soccer team, joined the football team to place-kick
and punt; and three girls—a Serb and two Nigerians who left home to play hoops for a team that never materialized.
Scheduling was a joke. Practices would be delayed, and delayed again, and finally called off. The football team’s coaches were replaced in October, and the squad kept canceling games before the season ended.
School was no better. Some days the busload of students would get all the way to the New Hope building and then turn around, students and coaches say. No school today. Once, they canceled school because it was raining, other times because the heat didn’t work. Another time, according to Morgans, they halted classes for a couple of weeks because the three teachers Flint had brought in walked off the job.
“One of the teachers, he said, ‘They ain’t paying us,’ and then it just spun out of control from there,” Morgans says. “And then they came back, and the kids were in school again.”
At first, there was food. And maybe even some hope that the whole school idea might work. “It was exciting,” says Morgans, who often shuttled players between lodging and practices. “We were living in that hotel in Stockbridge. We had three meals a day. Everything was good.”
After several weeks, though, “The food started slacking off,” Morgans says. “It wasn’t the same quality; it started to become bologna-and-cheese sandwiches, stuff like that.”
Within a couple of months, Morgans says, Flint could no longer afford the motel, especially after several of the football players left mid-semester. So in November he moved a group of Nigerians to a house several miles away, and another group of Africans and Serbs, including Stefan, into three townhouse-style apartments behind a big-box retail strip in Stockbridge.
Mahmadou, in his limited English, concisely described life in the apartments: “No heat. No food.”
