Pecos teen gets waiver for living arrangement
Assistant coach can return to team Jan. 2; no wins stripped from basketball program
The New Mexico Activities Association approved a hardship waiver for Pecos High School boys basketball player Carlos Cordova, allowing the senior to play for the Panthers the rest of the season, Superintendent Fred Trujillo said Tuesday.
Trujillo also said the state’s governing body for sports and activities ruled Pecos assistant coach Dominick Baca will return to the program Jan. 2, concluding the organization’s investigation into the living arrangement between Cordova and Baca that stemmed from a Thanksgiving Day story by The New Mexican.
The story detailed how the pair came to live together in the summer of 2015 and the friendship that developed from it.
No penalties were levied against the school, Trujillo said, and no wins will be stripped from the boys basketball program, which won the Class 3A title in March. Also, Baca and Cordova can continue to live together at their home in Pecos.
Baca referred all comments to Trujillo, and Pecos head boys basketball coach Ira Harge Jr. did not return a phone message left by The New Mexican.
NMAA Associate Director Dusty Young declined to comment.
The NMAA began its investigation Nov. 27 to determine if the arrangement violated its eligibility bylaws, and Pecos petitioned the organization’s hardship review committee to obtain a waiver for Cordova on the same day.
Trujillo said the school contended the living situation did not constitute a violation of the NMAA’s “Undue Influence of a Student” clause, which states a “participant living with coach, principal, teacher, or school official without legal guardianship” could be rendered ineligible for 180 days. Cordova offered Baca, who was commuting from Santa Fe to Pecos during the summer of 2015, a place to stay in his late grandfather’s trailer and they have lived together through three moves.
Trujillo said there were “extenuating circumstances” — specifically, that Cordova had no legal guardian when his grandfather Concepcion Cordova died in June 2015, and that Baca took on that role — that the hardship committee heard and influenced it to grant the waiver.
“I think that’s why the committee is here — to listen to those exceptions,” Trujillo said. “The basis of the story is the extenuating circumstance. I think the representatives who were there today took that to heart and made the ruling that we’re OK with.”
Baca had taken a leave from the boys basketball program since Nov. 27, and will return once the next school semester begins, Trujillo said.
“I still believe there was no undue influence, but what I think it is is that, regardless of the situation, a student-athlete was living with a coach and he wasn’t a legal guardian,” Trujillo said.
The New Mexican’s Thanksgiving Day story recounted how Baca and Cordova came to live together in July 2015 when Baca wanted to move to Pecos after being hired as an assistant coach a few months earlier. Cordova had a singlewide mobile home where he and his grandfather lived in on the outskirts of town until Concepcion died from cancer.
For a time, Carlos Cordova, now 18, said he was thinking about moving to Mexico to live with family.
That changed when Cordova said Baca told a group of players about wanting to move to town. The youth, who was living with his mother, Socorro Elena Cordova, at the time, offered Baca the dwelling.
“I was just kidding, and I didn’t think he was going to take me seriously,” Carlos Cordova said in an interview in November. “I said, ‘Hey, I have a house, and no one’s living in it right now.’ He said, ‘All right, I’ll look into it.’ Right after practice, when we were leaving, he came up to me and asked, ‘Are you being for real about the house?’ And I told him I was.”
Socorro Cordova said in the story she gave Carlos to her parents to raise after he was born while she moved to Albuquerque to find work. Socorro Cordova returned to Pecos after her mother, Maria Elena Perez, died when Carlos was 4, so she could help support her son and dad. Still, it was Concepcion Cordova who raised her son.
Socorro Cordova gave her son permission to live with Baca, saying: “I’m grateful Dominick and Carlos bumped into each other.”