Glory Days: 25-year-old relives high school basketball dominance by enrolling in high school again as a 17-year-old
Meet Sidney Gilstrap-Portley.
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He is 25 years old, and was once a fairly good high school basketball player.
When the city of Dallas opened up their high schools to refugees from the Houston area's Hurricane Harvey, he saw an opportunity.
School administrators in Dallas realized that Hurricane Harvey wreaked havoc upon many families, leaving them without homes, without possessions or documentation, and in some cases, teenage kids were left orphaned. These well-meaning yet gullible administrators wanted to encourage teenagers displaced by Hurricane Harvey to enroll in their schools without the usual red tape involved in school transfers. All they had to do was show up, tell their story of displacement, and they were instantly accepted.
It's mind-boggling that there was no sort of verification protocol in place, and that they simply trusted everyone who claimed to be high school students that they really were.
Sidney's life wasn't going all that well, and he missed those days in high school when he was a "somebody" on the basketball court. He enrolled in Skyline High School in Dallas through the Hurricane Harvey program, and then was transferred to Hillcrest High School, where he joined their basketball team.
He claimed his name was Rashun Richardson, said he was 17, and claimed to be homeless and without his parents, whose home he claimed was destroyed by Harvey.
While at Hillcrest, he dated a 14-year-old girl there, though the girl swears that their relationship "wasn't sexual" (lol).
As you might guess, he owned the high school kids on the floor, and was voted district offensive player of the year, even though his otherwise mediocre team went 11-10 during the season.
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Unfortunately for Sidney, he didn't account for the fact that he really was from Dallas (not Houston), and that others would eventually recognize him. His former coach from his days at Mesquite High School recognized him at a tournament, and it was game over for him. When the coach confronted him, he basically gave up and stopped coming to school. He was eventually arrested.
He had no criminal history and didn't cause any problems at the school. In fact, people at the school remember him being "a little too low-key" and surprisingly mature for 17.
The mother of the 14-year-old is furious at the school for letting this happen, and rightfully so.
Oddly enough, an earlier chance to catch him was bungled, and he slipped through the cracks. Students enrolled in varsity athletics there are required to go through a verification process in order to make sure they didn't play too many years of varsity sports. This would prevent a student held back for academic reasons from playing an extra year, for example. So they supposedly "verified" that Rashun Richardson went to South Houston High School and hadn't played varsity sports there, but clearly they didn't actually do that. South Houston High School later clarified that no Rashun Richardson ever went to school there. Hillcrest simply lied about having verified him.
This does resemble a secondary plot in the Drew Barrymore movie "Never Been Kissed". David Arquette played the brother of Drew Barrymore's nerdy character (who enrolled in high school as a 25-year-old, to do an undercover magazine report), and her adult brother also later enrolled and played on the baseball team, again becoming a star. However, in the movie, all was forgiven, and Arquette's character was allowed to become the school's assistant baseball coach.
No such luck here for Sidney Gilstrap-Portley.
It does appear that his primary motivation to have done all this was simply to relive his glory days as a high school basketball star.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crim...-officials-say
