Lots of people grow up hoping to one day become a professional athlete. Whether it is a guy who gets paid to hit a ball with a stick, hurl a different-sized ball towards the general direction of a basket, or hit other people as hard as you possibly can for the sake of a touchdown, most young people have at least entertained the notion. Then, well, reality sets in. Baseball requires incredible hand-eye coordination, which you most certainly do not have. Basketball is not looking for slightly chubby 6’0″ centers. Football requires you to not be a lazy oaf who thinks that running a 40 in nine seconds is an accomplishment. After that reality sets in, folks turn to other dreams. Some think about being a firefighter, others unicorn tamers, and a few more conjure up the idea of owning a pro sports team to fill that void of pro sports aspirations. There are a few other people, like me, who dream of something else. A world where they can own their own college. Wait… what? Let me explain. The purpose of wanting to own a university is not so much to help educate our youth — I mean, they’re rather helpless at this point anyway (am I right, Mike Wilbon?) — it is to selfishly oversee and build a Division I basketball program. Seems logical, right? Eh…

Luckily for me, I have a few friends who thought this was a tremendous idea. Now that we know such a thing is actually feasible, we started the process of building our university from scratch. With that being said, though, I doubt you want to read the logistics of it all. And to be honest, neither do I. Thankfully we live in a world where technology trumps all. I discovered an app on my phone which has allowed some form of time travel. Now, I can’t actually go to the future myself, but I can pull articles from there! That’s as exciting as hell. What I will now share with you is the article I found from 30 years from now that happens to tell the story of the university Randy, Drew, Bennet and I (all Rush the Court scribblers) started to build on Tuesday. I haven’t read it myself yet. I guess we will enjoy our college’s triumphs together! I bet we did awesome and the future is as cool as heck.

The Tragic Story of The Club State Pool Cleaners

Posted by Michael DeCourcy Jr. on March 26th, 2045

It is amazing to think that it has been 30 years since Club State University was formed from a simple idea. It was just four guys, bloggers (remember those?), who found a loophole in the then-governing body of college sports, the NCAA. As our history books have taught us, the NCAA was a rather inept governing body. It allowed athletes to be punished over others’ clerical errors, forced kids to play basketball games on school nights, and didn’t even pay them to play. Think about that: There was a time in our country when an institution limited another group of people’s powers, while making millions upon millions of dollars off the backs of their hard work, and a good chunk of people were kind of okay with it. Alas, this story has nothing to do with the now-ancient practice of free labor. It is about four men who changed college basketball by founding one of the greatest basketball programs ever, but one that’s time has seemingly passed because of so many tragic, yet preventable events.

The Club State Pool Cleaners were the brainchild of one man. Joseph Nardone, at the time, was a rather low-level blogger, incredibly unsuccessful in the business world, longing for a day when he could do something he actually loved. Articles from those years report on Nardone’s obsession with building a Division I program despite being pretty dumb. Here is an excerpt from Sports Illustrated (you may now know it as being called Sports With No Pictures) a few months after the paperwork to legalize the school was filed:

Read the rest of this entry »