Baseball coach warns of group scamming locals by posing as high school athletes

By Jason Burger

Click here for updates on this story

    EDMOND, Oklahoma (KOCO) — An Edmond baseball coach is warning of a group scamming locals by posing as high school athletes.

The group is using high school athletics as their cover. Based on what the coach said, the group pretends to be high school athletes doing a fundraiser, but none of them are even on a team and they aren’t getting their products through the district either.

“I get a phone call from our school resource officer, and he asks me if our program was selling cards at the time, I told him we weren’t,” said JP Holman, head baseball coach at Edmond Memorial High School

There was a reason for that call.

“Someone bought a card from a kid claiming to be a baseball player at Edmond Memorial,” Holman said.

In Edmond, Holman said a group of children are trying to sell discount cards for local shops and restaurants. They’re doing it in front of big box stores and sometimes selling door-to-door.

“We’re not selling cards, no other program at our school is selling cards, so if someone claims to be an athlete from Memorial, they’re not,” Holman said.

They claim to play on teams at area high schools, when they’re not on any team at all. The coach said his players never sell in front of those big stores and a red flag was when someone in Edmond bought one of the cards and tried to use it.

“She tried to use the card and it didn’t work, so that’s when she started asking questions and called the police,” Holman said.

It’s not so much about the money, but the student-athletes’ reputation. The coach said he wanted to speak out about this to protect all players at the school and the district.

“They take a lot of pride in playing for their school, and they’re the ones that are getting cheated, as well as the people in the community,” Holman said.

KOCO 5 was told legitimate team fundraiser cards will have the school’s logo on it, sometimes a team schedule, and when you take it to a local shop, it will actually work.

“It hurts us raising money, it hurts the companies that help us, it hurts the community, it’s just a bad look for everybody and it’s not fair,” Holman said.

The baseball team will do their fundraiser much later this year after the winter sports season starts. The coach said, to his knowledge, no one has been caught yet.

Please note: This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.