A former Georgetown University tennis coach who once coached former President Barack Obama’s family has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison for pocketing more than $3m in bribes in exchange for helping wealthy parents cheat their kids’ way into the school.
The sentence for Gordon Ernst on Friday is by far the toughest punishment handed down yet in the sprawling college admissions bribery scandal that shone a light on the lengths some rich parents will go to get their kids into the nation’s most selective schools.
Prosecutors had sought four years behind bars for Ernst, 55, who admitted to accepting nearly $3.5m in bribes over 10 years to designate the children of deep-pocketed parents as recruits even though they would not normally have been accepted into the university.
In a letter written to the judge, Ernst apologised and promised to spend the rest of his life trying to make amends.
“There is absolutely no excuse for my wrongful acts. While I became sick inside with self-hatred, I felt the victim and justified my actions with a list of grievances and a host of lies I would tell myself in order to rationalize my behavior for years,” Ernst wrote.
“Looking back, I lacked the honesty and humility to do what was right and ask for help.”
In his letter, Ernst described growing up in Rhode Island with a demanding and physically abusive father — another Rhode Island tennis legend, the late Dick Ernst — whom he called more a “coach and tyrant than a dad”. Ernst’s mother told The Boston Globe newspaper that her husband was never abusive.
Ernst played hockey and tennis at Brown University in Providence before getting coaching jobs at Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania. He was offered the head men and women’s tennis coach job at Georgetown in 2006 and was introduced by a friend two years later to admissions consultant Rick Singer, the mastermind of the bribery scheme, Ernst told the judge.
Of the six spots Ernst got every year to recruit tennis players, he regularly gave at least two — and often up to five — to unqualified students in exchange for bribes, according to prosecutors. Over the years, he helped nearly two dozen students fraudulently get into the school, Assistant US Attorney Kristen Kearney told the judge.
And unlike some of the other coaches charged in the case who were bribed in the form of money for their sports programmes,…