The ridiculous lies exposed in the college admissions bribery scandal would be “hilarious” if they hadn’t drowned out so many true athletes who actually put in the work, two former high school rowers told the Daily News.
Surya Murthy and Ally Stein were actual members of the Redwood Scullers rowing club in 2017 – the same year the younger daughter of Bay Area businessman Bruce Isackson gained early admission to USC with kickbacks and the bogus boast she too was a star on the elite team.
In her fake recruitment profile, Isackson’s daughter was touted as a “varsity 8 stroke” for Redwood Scullers with various “crew honors,” according to an FBI affidavit unsealed last week.
Murthy, 18, and Stein, 19, said Redwood Scullers didn’t even offer a varsity 8 boat.
“That was a straight-up lie. They weren’t even trying,” Murthy said with a laugh. “I thought that was almost hilarious. We never had a varsity 8. There’s no background checking for that?”
Murthy said the club’s name alone was a dead-giveaway. In sculling, each rower holds two oars, one on each side of the boat. With a varsity 8, each rower has only one oar.
Now a freshman at the University of Washington, Murthy said she never once met Isackson on the high school rowing circuit and was saddened to hear allegations Isackson and her parents wielded their wealth to purchase one of the highly coveted early-admission spots that real rowing athletes work so hard to attain.
“I had been trying to get recruited for a very long time. I had been training summer after summer. I went to nationals. I put a lot of work in. When spots are being taken like that on teams, it’s really disappointing,” she said.
Murthy recalled regularly rising at 4:15 a.m. on school days to be out the door by 4:25 and on the water of the San Francisco Bay by 5:10 for two-hour workouts that started in the dark.
“My junior year became all about college. I thought those 5 a.m. practices were going to get me into Stanford or Boston. I literally gave it my everything. My notebooks were filled with possible boat lineups. I had spreadsheets and flow charts. I was on phone calls with coaches every weekend,” Stein recalled.
Now a freshmen at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, Calif., Stein wasn’t as tall as the ideal college rowing candidate tended to be, but she had more than adequate race times, scored an impressive 30 on the ACT and knocked out a 3.7 GPA while training more than 20 hours a week, she said.
“I was such a competitive athlete. I was interested in USC, but they stopped talking to me in the first few rounds,” she said.
Stein called it laughable that YouTube personality Olivia Jade Giannulli, the daughter of “Full House” star Lori Loughlin, also gained early admission to USC in late 2017 as yet another fake crew recruit alongside Isackson.
According to prosecutors, Loughlin and her fashion designer husband Mossimo Giannulli paid a total of $500,000 to get both of their daughters admitted to USC as specially recruited coxswains.
The famous parents were arrested last week along with Isackson’s mother and father in a sweeping sting operation that charged 50 people in the largest college admissions cheating scandal ever prosecuted by the Justice Department.
According to the feds, Bruce and Davina Isackson paid more than $350,000 to a fake charity set up by Newport Beach admissions consultant William (Rick) Singer to buy their younger daughter’s USC admission under his elaborate scheme. The eye-popping sum covered a corrupt proctor who rigged the daughter’s ACT score and the bribing of athletic department personnel at USC, prosecutors allege.
The same parents previously paid approximately $251,249 in Facebook shares to get their older daughter into UCLA as a fake soccer recruit in 2016, authorities claim.
In the case of Loughlin’s daughters, the feds claim the Giannulli sisters posed for staged photos on rowing machines as part of their separate applications in different academic years.
Olivia Jade’s ginned up profile allegedly said she was a coxswain for the L.A. Marina Club team. No such team appears to exist. There’s a Marina Aquatic Center Junior Rowing team based out of Marina Del Rey in Los Angeles County, but it’s known as MAC Rowing to everyone in the southwest division, Murthy said.
Stein, who rowed in a varsity 8 for a different club before joining Redwood Scullers, said there’s no way the Giannulli sisters could have survived a single day of college-level practice without being exposed as frauds. She said maybe they fit the coxswain weight requirement of being 110 pounds or less, but it takes tons of training to steer a boat competitively.
“You have to know the sport like the back of your hand. If a boat is jerking, you have to know if it’s timing or wind,” Stein said. “You can’t come in as a novice. You would look like a fool.”
Murthy called it “pretty shocking” that Olivia Jade was admitted as a crew recruit without anyone in the admissions department asking questions. The social media influencer already had reached a million YouTube subscribers by September 2017 and video blogged regularly about her glamorous life with no mention of any athletic career.
“It’s pretty irresponsible they let someone like Olivia Jade slip by like that. She’s so popular. It’s remarkable no one noticed,” Murthy said.
“I know girls who spent their whole high school careers working toward this. It’s really heartbreaking to hear about these spots being taken. It made me wonder how many spots I could have gotten if people weren’t paying their way in like this,” she said.
Murthy said she was so disillusioned by how few spots there seemed to be during her recruitment year, she gave up competitive rowing altogether.
“I spent years emailing coaches. Now I’m realizing a lot of the spots I was trying to get were taken by someone who paid their way in,” she said. “I’m not rowing anymore. I just felt the field became too competitive for me.”
Stein, who also gave up competitive rowing to enroll at Cal Poly, said she hopes the kids who actually knew about their parents’ bribes felt at least some form of “moral conflict” and only went along because their parents pressured them.
“I feel robbed, but mostly for my friends who stopped getting recruited to USC in the final rounds,” Stein said.
