The Fab Four is no more. Don Bosco expelled Yuri Wright after school Wednesday, apparently for tweets he made on his twitter feed.
This was an interesting day. I received word that Yuri Wright had been expelled from Don Bosco around 9 a.m. and tried to make some phone calls to see if it was true. No one was answering the phone at Bosco. I texted a teammate and he wrote back to say he couldn’t really talk about it.
A few hours later, a story off of a Michigan recruiting blog said that the school had backed off of recruiting Yuri because of some definitely X-rated tweets. And you know, I follow a bunch of kids on twitter, Im sure I had seen the tweets, but, to be honest, I had seen plenty of things like this before. And Facebook is even worse….This speaks to a whole new issue in sports and social media, because kids go on there and say stuff and they don’t know everyone is watching.
Around 4 p.m. Bosco coach Greg Toal called me back and confirmed basically that Yuri was expelled and it was because of the tweets. His quote to me was “Don Bosco had to do what Don Bosco had to do.” Toal said he really liked Yuri and hoped that this didn’t ruin his college future.
I don’t know what (if any) connection there is to the Michigan recruiting story to Yuri being expelled, but the timing is definitely curious. When we talked before the U.S. All-American Bowl, Yuri had told me he was down to 4 schools, Rutgers, Notre Dame, Colorado and Michigan. Honestly, I thought all along he was going to Notre Dame. He and Shumate are good friends and I figured he was going to follow his friend there.
Now, here is what I would say about Yuri. The kid I got to know is a nice young man, but I definitely saw a rough side once, I was at a practice last year and saw Yuri get into a fight with another player in practice. He was made to stay after and do a lot of conditioning. He had also had some issues playing basketball at Bosco I believe. In fact, he had never really gone out for football much until after sophomore year. That was another reason why his potential seemed so vast. And the football coaches loved him. They knew he had Division 1 ability and was smart. I talked to a couple of other Bosco coaches on staff tonight and they are all saying the same thing, they are sorry.
But the school had no choice. You read the tweets (they are still out there, but I’m not going to link to it here) and they are wrong on a lot of levels. He should have know that.
I would say 2 other things about Yuri, one game, I think it was maybe Mission Viejo, I tried talking to him on the bench after the game. He was extremely downcast, even though his team had won 35-7, but he was disappointed because the 1 touchdown was over him. And down in Manatee, he was the man in coverage on that late touchdown that was a terrible call. It just seemed like he couldn’t catch a break and he took every failure to heart.
Still, he was an excellent player. Long arms, great ball skills, you see now all of these basketball players in the NFL now (like Saints TE Jimmy Graham) and they can just go up and get the ball like a rebound. That was Yuri.
Yuri was kind enough to do a diary for me before the All-American game and I have to tell you, of the 5 kids, he surprised me the most with what he had to say. I had to edit a bunch of what the guys wrote, but Yuri….I didn’t really, and he was the first one to ask if he could give a “shoutout” to his friends and family. And once he did that, all of the other kids who did a diary wanted to follow.
I don’t know where Yuri goes now….Spring Valley HS? I’m sure he will get a full ride to a good college. Talent can’t be denied. But like Toal said today, Don Bosco had to do what it had to do.
