When he answered his cell phone one afternoon last week, Gordie Ernst was watching his younger daughter compete in the semifinals of the state tennis tournament. He sounded excited, and with good reason. No longer a college coach, he had time to watch his daughter play a sport in which he long ago excelled.
I asked if we could talk about his life now, what he is doing, how his family is. Sure, he said, but let me check with my lawyer first.
Life as Gordie Ernst knew it ended in March of 2019. Federal prosecutors charged one of the greatest high-school hockey and tennis stars in Rhode Island history with racketeering conspiracy for his role in what became known as the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal.
Ernst lost his job as the women’s tennis coach at the University of Rhode Island, where he had been on the staff for only seven months. That dismissal followed his departure from Georgetown University after the school learned of improprieties in the recruitment of tennis players. He had coached men’s and women’s tennis there for 12 years.
Prosecutors alleged that between 2012 and 2018 Ernst accepted $2.7 million in bribes for listing at least a dozen applicants as recruits for his program, even though several did not play competitive tennis. Being slotted as a recruited athlete facilitates admission for applicants.
On Oct. 25 in U.S. District Court in Boston, Ernst pleaded guilty to three counts of federal programs bribery, conspiracy to commit federal programs bribery and filing false tax returns. He faces up to four years in prison, two years of supervised release and forfeiture of $3,435,053. Sentencing is March 2, 2022.
Two days later, Gordie and I did talk. “You should feel special. This is the first!” he had written to confirm. He could not discuss details of his case, and I consented to his request not to mention the names of his wife and daughters to respect their privacy. They are not part of his case.
Gordie sounded upbeat, energetic, grounded, but said, “That doesn’t mean it hasn’t crushed me.”
We shared old hockey and tennis stories. We laughed together when he mentioned the Cranston guy, a character, who called and told him that his father was rolling over in his grave, “not for what you did but because you’re getting more press than he did.”
A bit of background on Family Ernst to explain why Rhode Island is following this story. Gordie’s father Dick played hockey and tennis into his 70s, coached at high schools and colleges in Rhode Island for five decades, and promoted Gordie and his accomplishments long after Gordie had left home. Dick died in 2016 at the age of 78. His mother Rollie was a stay-at-home mom who shuttled her sons to junior tournaments all over New England. His brothers Bobby and Andy were All-State hockey and tennis players at Cranston East. Bobby played hockey at Brown for four years. Andy skated in Canada and Florida. He died in 2014 at 45.
Gordie, now 54, was the Golden Boy. All-State in hockey and tennis. 97-0 in tennis. The Providence Journal-Bulletin Honor Roll Boy in 1985. Hockey and tennis at Brown. Tennis coach at Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown. Anybody remotely connected with hockey or tennis in Rhode Island in the last 60 years recognizes the Ernst name. They do not need Varsity Blues.
Gordie has stayed busy while dealing with the ramifications of a federal indictment and his plea deal. He drove and washed cars for a Hertz rental facility on Cape Cod. Good, physical work, he said. Also on the Cape he assisted the elderly at a COVID testing center and taught tennis lessons during the summer “for great people I’ve been teaching for years who stayed behind me.”
He officiated hockey games on Cape Cod and down South. “Talk about something a million years ago you never thought you’d do would be so much fun,” he said.
Last summer he had a hip replacement, the result of too much hockey before he was 16, his doctor suggested.
Closer to home in Rockville, Md., he packaged and delivered meals and fed the homeless for Catholic Charities of Washington, D.C. Another great experience, he said, fulfilling in a different way than coaching. He also worked for a small tennis club in Virginia.
A silver lining to this ordeal, he emphasized, is the time he has spent with his family, especially his daughters, one a college freshman and the other a high-school junior. It is time he seldom had when he was coaching. “I was so busy it was hard to be there for everything with them. At Georgetown I was coaching two teams with a volunteer assistant. When you’re not with one team, you’re with the other. You basically don’t have a day off except around Christmas,” he said.
There were also private lessons and his sessions with the Obama family at the White House. Each of those visits took three hours from check in to check out. He did that for eight years, leaving no time for activities like helping with his younger daughter’s hockey team. Coaching her and her teammates the last two years became one of the best experiences of his career. “So fun. Great group of kids. It’s so different from tennis. A lot of camaraderie,” he said.
Returning to his roots in Rhode Island, Ernst found support from his mother, his grandmother Alice Jones, and old friends from his hockey and tennis days in Cranston. When he walks into his childhood home or his grandmother’s house, “I’m talking about getting smiles and hugs. It doesn’t matter what happened, what’s in the paper that day, the Netflix thing (“Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal”). They have given me incredible strength through all this.”
Playing hockey again helped him cope. In Washington he played noontime pickup games at the training facility of the Washington Capitals. He said the experience was awesome and a good stress relief. In Rhode Island he caught up with his old hockey buddies. He skated on a team with Eddie Lee, John Harwood, Sedge Gray and the Bennett brothers, Jim and Bill. They won the Potter Cup tournament at Cranston Rink.
“That type of stuff is amazing for therapy,” he told me. “You’re with the guys. You’re in the locker room talking about the old days. It’s therapy for all the chaos going on.”
Gordie understands he is responsible for some of that chaos and its impact on those he loves.
“The collateral damage of this thing and how it’s affected my girls has killed me,” he said, “killed me. The worst part about it is your self-loathing and your beating yourself up. It’s one thing if you do something, and it doesn’t affect anyone. When it affects your daughters, it’s a hundred times worse.”
A few minutes later, he added this: “When it comes to my kids, I can’t tell you the remorse and the sadness that I feel and how it has affected their lives.”
Talking to a therapist and listening to podcasts have helped Gordie put this experience in perspective.
“Life is winning and losing, just like sports,” he said, acknowledging the cliche. “Sometimes you have some good streaks of winning, but you can lose and go through suffering. Like when my brother Andy died, right? You think that’s going to be your suffering. . . and then you go through something like this, and it’s another heavy blow.”
Gordie paused and then finished.
“Life is about choices, and there are consequences. It’s been tough.”
Mike Szostak writes sports columns for The Public’s Radio
