Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

Man, 25, poses as high school student to play basketball

1526477876927

A 25-year old man was arrested after posing as a student at a Dallas high school so he could play high school basketball, according to a report from The Dallas Morning News.

The man’s named is Sidney Bouvier Gilstrap-Portley and he claimed that he was a Houston-native that had been displaced by Hurricane Harvey, enrolling as a freshman at Skyline High School under the name Rashun Richardson. Eventually, he transferred to Hillcrest High, where he joined the basketball team and started making a name for himself in the high school and AAU ranks.

His cover was blown two weeks ago when, at an AAU tournament, he was spotted by a former coach, who tipped off Hillcrest to the fact that they had a grown man pretending to be a teenage boy.

Gilstrap-Portley was able to pull this scheme off because he claimed that he was an evacuee, which, by federal law, means that he would not need the necessary paperwork that would help protect the school from a situation like this.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen this situation play out in Texas. Seven years ago, a man by the name of Guerdwich Montimere pretended to be a Haitian orphan named Jerry Joseph in order to enroll at Permian High School to live out a basketball dream that died in junior college years earlier. He was eventually arrested and incarcerated after he had a sexual relationship with an underage student at the school. Gilstrap-Portley allegedly dated a 14-year old at Hillcrest, but the girl’s mother claims that relationship never became sexual.