Ex-Georgetown tennis coach to plead guilty in college scam

BOSTON — A former Georgetown University tennis coach accused of accepting more than $2 million in bribes to help kids get into the school will plead guilty in the sweeping college admissions scandal, according to court documents filed Wednesday. Ernst, who was the head men and women’s tennis coach at Georgetown, was arrested in March 2019 along with more than four dozen others in the so-called “Operation Varsity Blues” case that revealed a scheme to get undeserving kids into elite universities with rigged test scores or bogus athletic credentials. Ernst, who also was the personal tennis coach for former first lady Michelle Obama and her daughters, left Georgetown in 2018 after an internal investigation launched over what the school described as “irregularities in the athletic credentials” of students he was recruiting concluded that he violated admissions rules. Ernst had been fighting the charges for more than two years and was set to stand trial alongside the former senior associate athletic director at the University of Southern California, Donna Heinel, and two other coaches: ex-USC water polo coach Jovan Vavic and former Wake Forest University women’s volleyball coach William Ferguson.