What Am I Paying for?

It was a bold new idea: an all-sports college, classes be damned. But for the athletes at Forest Trail Sports University who faced hunger, sickness and worse, it turned into a nightmare.

- Peter Keating

The players are changing into their uniforms in the parking lot. The opponents are the Virginia Marlins, representing the University of Virtual Applied Athletics in Danville, Virginia. The crowd numbers three dozen, if you include the dogs sitting in the concrete grandstands, which are only slightly harder and grayer than the infield. In every way, the scene suggests the lowest possible rung of competition.

Yet the rhythms of opening day—muscles twitching, bats swinging, adrenaline pulsing—are particularly exciting for the group of 20 college age athletes gathering behind the third-base line. “It’s liberating,” says Nick Roets, 19, of Wingate, North Carolina. “We didn’t know how this was going to turn out, but we knew that getting out of there was in our best interest.”

“There” was Forest Trail Sports University, which promised a new kind of college experience, focused on athletics. And these players—they have named themselves the Renegades, but Refugees would be just as accurate—are survivors of its collapse. Arriving last August at the for-profit program, which charged a tuition of nearly $33,000, they were consigned to an old hotel, without adequate facilities, staff or supervision, on a campus where the threat of violence turned out to be more common than classes.

All the players taking the field have a story: The 6-foot-5 lefty starter had come to FTSU looking for another shot at impressing scouts but was rebuked for trying to eat more than a single Pop-Tart for breakfast; the second baseman found himself taking BP on a caged-in tennis court knotted with tree roots and branches; the third baseman discovered holes in his bed and mold in the air conditioner.