Signing your life away

Elena Delle Donne's decision to leave Connecticut provides yet another example of how the college recruiting process is heavily weighted against the kids and almost entirely favors the schools.
Delle Donne, a 6-foot-5 forward from Wilmington, Del., was the nation's top girls basketball recruit this past year, and signed a national letter of intent to attend Connecticut for the coming fall. At Storrs, Delle Donne was expected to join Maya Moore and Renee Montgomery and be the final piece to the Huskies' national championship puzzle hopes.
The problem was that Delle Donne, who took a break from basketball while she was at Ursuline Academy, apparently changed her mind about wanting to attend/play at Connecticut. It's shouldn't have been a big deal. Teenagers change their minds all the time, and Delle Donne has every right to attend the school where she'll be the most comfortable.
End of story, right? Well, not so much. You see, because Delle Donne signed a letter of intent, Connecticut still has a hold on her future, or at least her basketball playing future. By NCAA rule, she must sit out a year if she decides to play basketball at another Division I school. It's not the greatest rule in the world, particularly when you consider that coaches can flit from campus to campus without restriction, but it's not the worst.
No, the worst rule is the one that could cost Delle Donne a year of eligibility. You see, Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma has not released her from her scholarship, and unless he does, she'll have to forfeit one of her four years of eligibility. That is, if she wants to transfer to play basketball at a school that honors the letter of intent, which pretty much covers all of Division I and II, where scholarships are offered.
This isn't to portray Auriemma as a bad guy, per se. He's just following the rules, and, more than likely, he wants to make sure that Delle Donne doesn't abscond to a school that he will play in the next four years, where she could come back to hurt him. It's just that the rules, as they're set up, don't give kids the freedom they need at the time of their lives when they need it most, the years when they make decisions that will impact their futures, like where they'll go to school.