Is winning the game failing the student? Chasing athletic trophies and pots of gold, Catholic schools are dropping the ball.

ANDREW FAILED ENGLISH CLASS FALL QUARTER. SCHOOL policy rendered the football team's star halfback academically ineligible for that weekend's playoff game. Yet there he stood at the heart of the Friday afternoon pep rally. The dean--who also happened to be the football coach--ruled that Andrew could play Friday since grades weren't officially recorded until the following Monday.

A public school shenanigan? Nope. An increasingly common practice that threatens the religious and academic foundation of Catholic secondary education.

That moment drove home to me, Andrew's English teacher, how sports can consume a Catholic school's priorities. The message played loud and clear: Athletics trumped academics. The possibility of winning a football game superseded the school's integrity.

What I witnessed that autumn day at St. Thomas Academy--a Catholic prep school in Mendota Heights, Minnesota--reflects the nationwide scene. A recent revolution has shifted the place of athletics from extracurricular to core component. The revolution has transformed Catholic schools--once known for their faith formation and scholastic grooming--into sports factories.

Catholic principals will tell you that they're using athletics to shape character. Don't believe them. They're doing it for money. Bottom line: Catholic schools have sold their souls.

Now I have nothing against sports themselves. I play them. I cheer them. I've coached them at the high school level. But I've also seen them strip schools of their integrity.

Education has become a business. Catholic schools looking to survive in a competitive marketplace turn to sports for financial salvation. "Since Catholic schools need to market themselves to the larger community and to attract students and benefactors with available resources, successful athletic programs can be a powerful tool for a well-ordered Catholic school," the National Catholic Education Association advises in its book Athletics and the Gospel Mission of the Catholic School. A winning program boosts enrollment and draws bigger donations by building an irresistible reputation for success, or so the theory goes.

This marketing strategy denigrates Catholic secondary schools to the level of college programs, notorious for their corruption. In step with this strategy, coaches recruit players in defiance of league rules. Admissions directors accept talented athletes over more qualified students. The prize recruits deplete scholarship funds. The schools sacrifice their standards to build athletic powerhouses because nothing brings home the bacon like a winner.

Consider Danny Charleston. Never mind that the D-student wasn't Catholic, that his working-class parents couldn't afford tuition, and that they didn't plan to move with him to a school 400 miles away. Danny could skate. He could score. Benilde-St. Margaret's, a Benedictine high school in St. Louis Park, Minnesota that had recently made a commitment to athletic excellence, welcomed the sophomore transfer. The hockey team won the state championship, and the school's capital campaign prospered.

It rubbed a few parents the wrong way, though. "You're hiring a student to perform a function for your own end," observed Paul Pattee, whose son was cut from the Benilde-St. Margaret's hockey team the year Danny Charleston arrived. "The school would say, 'We're giving these kids a chance to turn around,' but I take issue with that. They're brought in as hired guns and don't have the commitment to academics."

THE PURSUIT OF ATHLETIC EXCELLENCE ROBS WELL-INTENTIONED administrators of their perspective. They put winning a football playoff game before passing English class, as in Andrew's case. They shelter athletes from the consequences of other indiscretions, ranging from underage drinking to sexual assault. In the case of at least one Texas high school, coaches become pushers, doling out "vitamins" designed to boost performance without reading the warning labels--all for the sake of victory.

Not all Catholic schools line up with the goats in this regard, of course. There remain those administrators with moral backbone strong enough to withstand the athletic temptations, principals and deans that recognize the student athlete as a student first and Catholic schools as primarily Catholic. In these institutions sports supplement the gospel mission; they don't supplant it. These schools are the winners.

JOHN ROSENGREN, author of Blades of Glory: The True Story of Championship Dreams and a Young Team Bred to Win (Sourcebooks, 2003). Andrew is not the real name of the student mentioned in this article.