FEBRUARY 2022 39the checks came from Singer, his boss cut him off. “Oh, we
know Rick,” said Muir. “We know Rick well.” (A Stanford
spokesman tells SI: “Coach Cohen does not recall ever
endorsing Singer....Stanford’s athletic director never met
or spoke with Singer and had no relationship with him.”)
After being indicted, Vandemoer was fired. He would
plead guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy and be
sentenced to one day in prison, six months of house arrest,
two years of probation and a $10,000 fine. A subsequent
external review commissioned by Stanford found no
evidence that any other employee of the athletics depart-
ment had “agreed to support a Singer client in exchange
for financial consideration.” It did, however, note that
Singer “directly or indirectly approached seven Stanford
coaches about potential recruits between 2009 and 2019.”
Vandemoer was f loored. “I didn’t buy for a minute that
I was the only one who’d been taken in by him,” he says.
“Why would Singer keep coming back, year after year, if
his efforts weren’t bearing fruit?” He made those points in
a book published last fall, Rigged Justice: How the College
Admissions Scandal Ruined an Innocent Man’s Life.
“I get asked, ‘Will this be the difference? Will this change
these schools?’ ” Vandemoer says, referring to the scandal-
ous publicity around Varsity Blues. “My simple answer is
‘no,’ because the people in charge are the problem.”
Vandemoer has been diagnosed with PTSD and “I still
have my moments,” he tells SI, “my nightmares, when
the anger, the frustration comes back.” But he’s found
catharsis talking about his ordeal. And he is back on the
water, coaching kids, ages 10 to 13, in Redwood City, Calif.
Center has had a rougher go of it. For one, he spent
months inside a 10-by-10-foot cell and experienced first-
hand the defects and vagaries of America’s criminal justice
system. W hen he contracted COVID-19 in the summer of
2020, his denial for transfer to home confinement was
rejected because the judge misread the file and believed
Center was a college tennis player in his early 20s—not
a former college tennis coach in his early 50s.
Since his release in August 2020, he has struggled to
find employment and fulfillment. Opposed to uprooting
his wife and teenage sons, he decided to remain in Austin.
But that means constant exposure to the institution he
feels betrayed him. “There are,” he says, “triggers every
day.” Like Vandemoer, Center says he has benefited from
therapy and that Varsity Blues has left him with PTSD.
Center says that, at his lowest moments, he has leaned
on the same advice and bromides he spent years dispens-
ing to his athletes. Tell the truth. Own It. Forgive yourself
and then forgive others. Rise to the occasion. Pressure is a
privilege. Some of them ring true. Some ring hollow.
He catches himself when he ref lects on one adage, in
particular. “I was always taught that actions have con-
sequences,” he says. “I said that one all the time. What
I’ve come to realize is that, yes, for some people actions
absolutely do have consequences. Serious, heavy ones. For
others, actions can have no consequences at all.”department by funneling through fake athletes, that’s
fraud. One department doesn’t have license to rip off an
entire [school].”
So why didn’t Varsity Blues implicate more high-ranking
officials at the schools? “Prosecutors go where the evi-
dence takes them,” Rosen says. “If it were a school policy
to accept fake athletes in exchange for money, it probably
would not be a crime. But admissions thought these were
legitimate athletes recruited to play on their teams. And
they weren’t.”
But it remains an open question: What did admissions,
and other administrators, know at each of the eight
Varsity Blues schools? Consider Stanford. There, sailing
coach John Vandemoer designated two applicants as athlete
recruits, without vetting them. In exchange, he received
$770,000 from Singer. Neither student matriculated to the
school. And Vandemoer kept none of the funds personally,
instead investing them in the Stanford sailing program.
Vandemoer recalls that when he mentioned Singer, other
members of the athletic department spoke glowingly of
him. “He’s a guy you can trust,” Vandemoer remembers
Stanford assistant basketball coach Adam Cohen enthusing.
Vandemoer says he handed over a check for $500,000
from Singer’s charity—part of the $770,000—to a fundrais-
ing administrator in the athletic department. Pleased by
this windfall, she summoned Bernard Muir, Stanford’s AD.
According to Vandemoer, when he began to explain that
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Center says he accepts the consequences
of his actions, which included six months
in federal prison. He struggles, though,
with the lack of accountability for others.