MCI basketball coach eager for fresh start

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David Campbell spent 19 months of his more than 30 years in basketball coaching the Barton County Community College men’s team.

His stint at the Great Bend, Kan., school left him a convicted felon.

Almost six months after he was found guilty of signing falsified papers for student-athletes who received federal work study funds in a scandal that has rocked the small school, the 65-year-old Pennsylvania native is looking for another chance at Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield.

MCI hired Campbell, a 65-year-old member of the National Junior College Athletic Association Basketball Coaches Hall of Fame, after finding he was a “victim of circumstance.”

Campbell, who interviewed in Pittsfield on July 5 and moved to town on July 22, pled guilty to a count of aiding and abetting misapplication of funds from a student assistance program and was sentenced Feb. 13 in Wichita, Kan., to three years of federal probation.

Campbell was also ordered to pay $7,714 in restitution. The money represents the total value of the loss to the Federal Work Study Program from Aug. 23, 2003, to Feb. 21, 2005.

“We have investigated this matter and are confident that Dave Campbell was more a victim of circumstance than any intentional wrongdoing,” said Joanne Szadkowski, MCI’s head of school.

Campbell heard about the MCI opening through the school’s former coach Max Good, with whom Campbell is friendly.

“MCI has given me an opportunity,” Campbell said, speaking with a Midwestern-tinged accent. “America gives people second chances. This is my second chance.”

The circumstance to which MCI believed Campbell fell victim was occurring before he was hired at Barton County, according to documents from District Court in Wichita. The court found Campbell “did not initiate or devise the practice of submitting false time sheets to obtain [federal work study] program and campus employment funds for student athletes.”

That finding, in addition to Campbell’s background, references and forthrightness, helped MCI officials see past his felony conviction despite inevitable questions about the hire.

“We had a choice. Do we be safe and take a different candidate that won’t cause any stir? Or do we take the quality individual that we think we’ve got here?” Szadkowski said. “And we made what I think was the right decision for the school.”

Campbell was one of eight defendants who have been indicted on charges connected to the falsified time sheets.

Those eight include Ryan Wolf, who was the basketball coach Campbell replaced in 2003, Wolf’s assistant coach Mark Skillman, who also coached under Campbell, and athletic director Neil Elliott. Several track and field coaches were also charged.

In the wake of the scandal, the school’s Board of Trustees fired college president Veldon Law on July 19, 2005. Law has filed a defamation and breach of contract lawsuit, according to the Associated Press.

Trying to get through the Barton County situation was “devastating,” Campbell said. He leaned on his family, including wife Nancy and three grown sons. His youngest, 25-year-old Bryan, is currently serving in a cavalry unit in Iraq.

“They were great,” he said. “They gave me support the whole way through.”

MCI hired Campbell to replace Ed Jones. Szadkowski said she could not comment on why Jones was no longer coaching. Jones, a former University of Maine assistant coach, was hired in 2003.

There were more than 60 applicants for the job, Szadkowski said.

Campbell, whose career coaching record is 624-262 (.704), was hired June 27, 2003, to coach the Barton County men’s team. He began signing time sheets for work study students that summer. Campbell maintained he did not prepare the time sheets, but did sign them.

About 1-2 months after his hiring, Campbell said he started to suspect something was not right with the time sheets he was signing. An example of the falsified times sheets, Campbell said, was a time sheet, signed by another coach, that claimed a student-athlete had worked six hours in a day to clean windows in a weight room.

Campbell said he asked Elliott about the time sheets.

“The athletic director’s statement to me was, that this is the way you pay the bills,” Campbell said. “Well, it’s not right.”

Campbell said he’d had enough in February 2005 and told Elliott he would not sign falsified time sheets any longer.

“All I ever did was sign the time sheet. That’s all I did. I didn’t even prepare them, and that was my mistake and that’s why I paid for it,” he said. “… I refused to sign any more and I was asked to resign. If you didn’t do it, you weren’t going to have a job. I just got to a point where I said, I’m not doing it any more.”

The Barton County Community College board of trustees accepted Campbell’s resignation in May 2005.

Earlier in his time at Barton County, Campbell also got into a situation in which he was found to have paid for a plane ticket to send an athlete, Joao Paul Batista, to live with one of the coach’s former players in Atlanta, which is a violation of National Junior College Athletics Association rules.

Campbell said Elliott signed a voucher for a plane ticket, but was never censured for it. Campbell was placed on probation.

Batista ended up playing for Gonzaga but the NCAA suspended him for two exhibition and two countable games in the 2004-05 season.

Campbell, who is known as “Soupy,” said he should be judged on his decades of work as a basketball coach.

“My thing is, in this here,” Campbell said, pointing to his resume, “there’s been more good done in my lifetime than in that one [felony] count there.”

Campbell has had a long and successful career as an assistant and head coach at several levels.

His stops as a young assistant coach included Duke, Tulane, and Appalachian State.

Campbell gained his first head coaching job in 1973 when he was hired by the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown. He was the District XVIII Coach of the Year in the 1974-75 season.

After stints at the College of Southern Idaho and the New Mexico Military Institute, Campbell settled into what has been his longest coaching tenure thus far. Starting in 1987 he served as the director of athletics and head men’s basketball coach at Western Nebraska Community College in Scottsbluff, Neb.

In his 13 seasons coaching there, Campbell’s teams won seven regional championships and finished top 10 in the nation five times. He was named Coach of the Year by the junior college coaches association in 1994-95, when Western Nebraska finished third in the nation with a 36-4 record.

Campbell was inducted into the national NJCAA Basketball Coaches Hall of Fame on March 17, 2003. He is also a member of the Bethel Park (Pa.) High School Athletic Hall of Fame and the Catawba College (N.C.) Sports Hall of Fame.

Although impressed with Campbell’s resume, it was the wealth of unsolicited letters and phone calls of support MCI received from all over the country that convinced school officials.

“These people were just calling saying, he doesn’t know I’m calling,” Szadkowski said. “Several of them referenced the situation and every one of them said, we know Dave Campbell, that’s not how he operates. He got caught in an unfortunate situation. He did the right thing by saying, hey, I was responsible and I signed the time sheets.”

During Campbell’s sentencing in February, U.S. District Judge Monti L. Belot said Campbell should be given another chance to coach.

“… I hope this is not the end of things for you,” Belot said. “I hope you can get other jobs. It’s obvious to me that you’ve otherwise led an exemplary life and that something shouldn’t be held against you in further employment that apparently is endemic in the college sports arena.”

Meanwhile, Campbell has settled into his new life in Maine, although he’s far from the family from which he gained so much support. He is living in Manson Hall, a dormitory on the MCI campus, while his wife has remained in Lincoln, Neb., where she teaches.

Campbell said his restitution will be paid off within a month, which he said means he will have fulfilled his parole requirements. He now has a probation officer in Bangor.

Even though the monetary obligation will be over soon, Campbell knows his conviction will be with him for the rest of his career.

“You know what? When you have a felony charge it never goes away and that’s the sadness of this whole thing,” he said. “This school situation ruined eight people’s lives and it never had to happen that way.”