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04-15-2007, 06:39 PM
Frank Martin — Miami vices?
The K-State coach and others from his past revisit issues surrounding his controversial firing as coach at powerhouse Miami High
By Tim Bisel and Kurt Caywood
The Capital-Journal
Published Sunday, April 15, 2007
MANHATTAN — In the days since he was promoted to replace Bob Huggins, Frank Martin's South Florida past has cast a dark cloud over his Kansas State present.
But many familiar with the stormy end to Martin's extraordinarily successful tenure as head basketball coach at Miami High nearly a decade ago say it shouldn't.
Martin included.
"I didn't think we did anything wrong," Martin said Thursday during an exclusive interview with The Topeka Capital-Journal. "I will go to my grave in my heart knowing that we did not break the law."
Martin was introduced last Monday as K-State's 22nd men's basketball coach. In 1998, he led nationally renowned Miami High to its third consecutive Florida Class 6A state championship.
But the Stingarees' success that year quickly was followed by controversy.
On Aug. 11, the Florida High School Activities Association ruled Miami High had violated the organization's recruiting policy because at least five players — Udonis Haslem, Antonio Latimer, Steve Blake, Thaddeus Ambrose and Damion Fray — received special inducement in the form of housing assistance from various school employees and boosters. The FHSAA (which has since changed its name so the first "A" stands for "Athletic") also discovered major violations in the school's baseball and boys soccer programs.
Miami High was fined $2,500, ordered to reimburse the FHSAA more than $5,000 for expenses incurred during the investigation, and forced to forfeit its latest state title and every game in a 36-1 season. All five players were banned from future competition for the school.
Martin, who graduated from Miami High in 1983, never was personally accused of recruiting violations or any wrongdoing in the cases of the players involved.
"I did not see anything in the file when I reviewed it that implicated him in any of this," said Jack Watford, FHSAA director of communications. "I told one reporter, 'If you're on a witch hunt, you need to look elsewhere. You're not going to find anything in Gainesville.' "
Still, shortly after the ruling, Martin was dismissed as the Stingarees' coach by former principal Victor Lopez, prompting some observers — and even some officials — to say Martin was a scapegoat in a corrupt athletic culture that existed long before he took over as coach.
"I think he understood to some extent what was going on, but I'm going to tell you, the machine he took over was bigger than he was," said Cheryl Golden, executive secretary of the Greater Miami Athletic Conference. "And at 31, you're very impressionable as to what elders of the machine will tell you.
"I truly believe that Frank to this day believes he did nothing wrong. I truly believe that because he did nothing different than the other people before him."
Letter versus spirit
Martin maintains Miami High's innocence is based on a Florida statute that reads, in part, "The bylaws governing residence and transfer shall allow the student to be eligible in the school in which he or she first enrolls each year. ... Where the student lives, with whom the student lives, or which school the student attended the previous year shall not be a factor in determining eligibility."
"The Florida High School Activities Association has certain rules where kids can transfer from school to school and be eligible to play," Martin said. "It was hard to govern and tell some kids, 'You can transfer for this to play, but you can't transfer for that to play.' So the legislators in the state stepped in and said, 'Enough of this. If you can't govern, we're governing,' and they put that statute in there."
Miami High, knowing it was under a microscope because of its high-profile history of success, followed that law to the letter, he said.
"If one of those kids would have been trying to transfer into the school illegally, just legitimately breaking the law, they would not have played at Miami Senior High School," he said. "When kids wanted to transfer in and coaches knew about it, there was a process that we followed. We brought everything to the people in charge of the school. The parents were told if you don't do things right, we're not going to accept you. It's as simple as that."
Martin said he trusted the process and those who administered it.
"If they're in school legally, who am I to intervene and say no?" he said. "I don't make those decisions. I coach the people that are students at the school. If you went to a public high school in Miami, let alone how many illegal transfers you have, how many illegal immigrants do you have?
"If I've got a young man or young lady transfer into my classroom ... I'm not going to go over and say, 'I need to see your green card; I need to see how long you've been in this country; I need to see proof that you've been legally transferred into this school.' That's not my job as a teacher. That shouldn't be my job as the basketball coach."
The FHSAA agreed to the extent that it never named Martin in the findings against Miami High, but it differed fundamentally in its interpretation of the statutes and rules governing eligibility.
"I'm sure what he's getting at is if they enrolled at Miami High at the beginning of the school year, they're eligible," Watford said. "The next sentence (of the statute) is crucial here: 'The (FHSAA) shall also adopt bylaws that specifically prohibit the recruiting of students for athletic purposes.' "
The courts have ruled, he said, that the statute is a basis for, and is superseded by, the more specific bylaws of the FHSAA. In that scenario, Miami High could have adhered to Florida law and still violated association rules.
Nearly a decade later, the point is moot. The state legislature since has struck from the law the sentence Martin cited as the basis for Miami High's eligibility standard.
And either way, the story isn't as two-dimensional as a legal debate. What Miami High did not only was institutionalized there, observers say it was the culture of the school district, if not the state.
Culture of corruption
Ask anyone who follows interscholastic sports in South Florida about the Miami High basketball program, and the answer is likely to include the word "machine."
The Stingarees won 15 state titles before Martin became head coach in 1995. They churned out eight championships and dozens of college recruits from 1987-1998, first under Shakey Rodriguez, then under Martin, who was just the third coach at the school in a span of 54 years. They enjoyed a home winning streak that reached 100 games during Martin's first season. They traveled the country because competition at home was lacking.
All the while, they rankled coaches and others who believed recruiting long had powered this machine.
"Frank Martin was not the first person who brought this cloud over Miami High," said veteran Miami Jackson coach Jake Caldwell, who served as Martin's student-teaching mentor in the spring of 1993 and helped him land his first head coaching position at North Miami High. "Even though Miami High has won a lot of championships, all of them have been questioned. Every one of their championships has been questioned.
"There were not happy campers out there that Miami High was winning all those championships."
Like it or not, the Stingarees kept winning them because they kept attracting the best talent.
Gloria Evans, who was a high school principal in the Miami-Dade County school district for more than a decade and the wife of a longtime high school track coach, said Miami High's tradition of success often enticed players or their parents.
Evans used Blake, one of the players mentioned in the FHSAA's ruling and currently a member of the NBA Denver Nuggets, to illustrate her point. Blake lived in Evans' neighborhood and should have attended Hialeah Miami Lakes High, she said. However, Blake's father wanted his son to play for a program that would showcase his talents, so he rented a room from a Miami High supporter, a violation of FHSAA policy.
"Frank may have gotten blamed, but when people buy a house in a neighborhood or rent an apartment and set up residence somewhere so their kid can go to school there, what do they want the coach to do?" Evans said. "I know what my husband would say. He'd say, 'I'm not going to do anything wrong, but I'm not going to go on a campaign and say this boy doesn't belong here.'
"I know how it works — in my sleep. Parents get their kids where they want them to go. It's all part of a machine."
So are boosters, some of whom were accused of recruiting on Miami High's behalf.
"Part of the problem that happened at Miami High for a number of years is the alumni machine was going out and getting these kids," said Golden, of the Greater Miami Athletic Conference. "The coach might not have ever known."
Then again, he might have. Martin's critics say he at least was guilty of turning a blind eye to problems within the program. If that were the case, Evans and others say the corrupt culture and recruiting missteps at Miami High existed long before Martin stepped on the sideline.
"If Frank did something wrong, they would really need to close down the whole school and basketball program and go back several years," Evans said. "The guy Frank followed, Shakey, all of that was there. They were doing all that."
Golden agreed.
"Frank was a casualty of circumstances he could not control," she said. "He was a casualty of circumstances that were not his doing. When you take over a program (like Miami High), there are things in place that are larger than you are."
Lopez, then the Miami High principal, didn't return a phone message left by The Capital-Journal, but he told The Manhattan Mercury that he fired Martin, along with longtime athletic director Tiger Nunez, because of the scope of the scandal.
"(Martin) was upset because there was nothing directly tying him to any of that stuff," Lopez said. "But it's like me being the school principal. There were a lot of things that took place in my building that I didn't do, but I was ultimately responsible. The same went for Frank and his basketball program."
The scope of recruiting and eligibility problems, however, extended beyond Martin's program and far outside the walls of Miami High. Caldwell, for instance, saw his legendary career end when he resigned as athletic director after Miami Jackson High was found to have committed the same sort of eligibility violations that led to Martin's dismissal.
"Do I think Miami High was the only one in that deal?" Golden said. "Heck no. They might have been the only one that got turned in because they won the state championship. But statewide, I'll guarantee there were probably a whole bunch of others."
Which raises the question: If violations were believed to be widespread, why was Miami High singled out?
"They don't ever look at a losing program," Golden said. "They only look at you if you win."
No team won more than Miami High. In February 1998, the Miami New Times launched an investigation, and a month later, days before the Stingarees captured their third straight state championship, published an article titled "Dream Team" that exposed most of the recruiting violations eventually cited by the FHSAA, most notably players living with school employees, coaches or boosters.
When asked about the New Times report, Martin said: "That's one journalist's opinion. ... Let's just say he used part of the truth in everything he wrote and not the entire truth. He did some research and printed some stuff that was accurate, but he didn't print the whole story."
According to Golden, what the story lacked was context.
"The context is, if found guilty or wrong of recruiting at the high school level, oh well," she said. "Happens every day. Our school system has 375,000 kids in it. If I truly would sit here and say, 'Oh, no, nobody recruits ...' Come on, this is Miami."
But the story and its fallout brought about change. Golden said the 44 high schools that make up the GMAC have policed each other more stringently since the Miami High case made headlines, first in the alternative New Times and later in more mainstream media.
"We police probably better than 95 percent of the state of Florida," she said, "… because it's never happening again. We're only going to be on the front page of the Herald once."
It's unrealistic, though, to think eligibility problems don't still occur, especially cast against a larger picture of a school district with a vast range of socioeconomic factors at work.
"To be honest with you, the ones who are not athletes move around a lot, too," Evans said. "Some of them are in public housing. We had kids at Booker T. (Washington High) who were living in homeless shelters, and we didn't know that. The only way we would know is if somebody got close to them, because they didn't want you to know that. Some of them are living on their own. Some would have to go to another school sometimes.
"But the athletes, and especially if they get to be a star athlete, then it's a big deal. From my point of view, you feel like saying, 'Come check out the other 25 percent of the school that's moving around from place to place."
Referring to character
Martin has seen the reports and heard the innuendo. He knows what was said after he was dismissed by Miami High and admits he is troubled by it.
"They say I was run out of high school basketball in the state of Florida," he said. "No, I was not run out of high school basketball in the state of Florida. I was rehired by the same region, by the same superintendent, by the principal at the neighboring high school right after this took place."
Evans was that principal. At the time, she was a 29-year employee of the school district with the responsibility of converting Booker T. Washington from a junior high back to a high school.
"I was looking for people who could help me start a program," she said. "I needed someone who could organize the program for success, and not just athletic success."
She, too, had heard the stories. Before she contacted Martin, she called the district office to find out what role he had played in the Miami High case and what mark it had left on him.
"I said, 'What's on Frank Martin's record? What does it say? Does it say he can't get hired? Did he do something?' " Evans related. "They said, 'No, whatever happened, he's been exonerated. We don't have any kind of hold on Frank Martin's record. There's no reason, as the district is concerned, that he can't coach basketball. There's no reason from the state that he can't coach basketball.' "
So, 13 months after his much-publicized firing, Martin was back to work at the high school level.
"And basketball literally went back into Frank's blood," Golden said. "It was from there (that) he formed himself out of nowhere."
The formation didn't take long. Martin spent only one season at Booker T. Washington before moving on to the college ranks.
He was as an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator at Northeastern University (2000-04) and the University of Cincinnati (2004-06) before joining Huggins in Manhattan a year ago.
Not once during his seven-year college career has he experienced any semblance of the controversy that shrouded his tenure at Miami High.
"Frank was probably one of the easier coaches I've ever worked with," said Maggie McKinley, director of compliance and student services at Cincinnati. McKinley was at UC in 2005 when president Nancy Zimpher ousted Huggins for character issues.
"(Martin is) a very friendly, very personable coach and was never afraid to ask questions," McKinley said. "He always was asking questions, making sure he was doing things the right way. We never had any compliance issues with Frank Martin. At all."
Evans isn't surprised.
"If I had any reservation, if I had felt that he went out of his way to do anything illegal as far as breaking rules or recruiting, I would not have put that pressure on us," she said.
"He was very successful for us. The kids loved him. If he came back tomorrow, I think everybody would love it."
The last word
Frank Martin was a football player in junior high. Miami had no professional baseball at the time and no professional basketball. He grew up a Dolphins fan, dreaming of being the next Larry Czonka.
But Martin never will forget the day in 1980 when, as a ninth-grader, he attended his first Miami High basketball game.
"You walk into that gym, and it's like no other gym in South Florida," he said. "It's got a balcony and it's all wood. And then the history. You walk in, and you see all those banners. And then it's sold out every night.
"And I said, 'Wow. I want to play this.' "
Actually, Martin never played for the Stingarees. Bottom line, he wasn't good enough. He was cut as a sophomore and spent his junior and senior years on the program's periphery, working out but never really working his way up.
Still, the dedication sparked on that first visit to the gym helps explain why his ouster cut him so deeply, why he nearly walked away from the game that now is his livelihood.
"I didn't realize how bad he did feel about it," Evans said, recalling a conversation she had with Martin when he resigned from Booker T. Washington to accept the Northeastern job. "But he said we kinda resurrected his faith in basketball, because he really had given up on it."
He won't relent on his conviction that what took place at Miami High was legal and above board. He knows the perception is that he was a party to violations, even if his were sins of omission rather than commission.
"That's why I was man enough to deal with the repercussions," he said. "That's why you've never heard me pass blame to anybody. The only thing you've ever heard me say is I was the head basketball coach and I understand what's going on, and it's my responsibility to make sure that these things don't happen. It's just as simple as that."
But don't misunderstand. Don't misinterpret Martin's words as an admission of guilt. Asked if he would do anything differently today, Martin was succinct.
"I'd do it exactly the same," he said. "Do it exactly the same."
Tim Bisel can be reached at (785) 295-1289 or tim.bisel@cjonline.com. Kurt Caywood can be reached at (785) 295-1288 or kurt.caywood@cjonline.com.
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