MKRob Sports

The head of the Alabama High School Athletic Association said on Saturday that the association would analyze a report that a former high school coach paid the rent for a player who wound up at Kentucky.

The New York Times reported in Saturday’s editions that Maurice Ford, the former coach at A. H. Parker High School in Birmingham, Ala., paid the rent of Eric Bledsoe, who played for Kentucky last season before declaring himself eligible for the NBA Draft.

Steve Savarese, the executive director of the Alabama association, said that if the allegations prove to be true, Parker might have to forfeit its season, which ended with a loss in the state championship game. “We’ll formulate and evaluate and see if we have enough information to investigate,” Savarese said.

Bledsoe transferred to Parker High School for his senior year after his previous school, Carol W. Hayes High School, closed. Brenda Axle, the landlord of the house that Bledsoe and his mother lived in, said that Ford paid her at least three months’ rent — $1,200 in cash — after they moved to the Parker zone.

“A.H.S.A.A. rules prohibit violations of amateurism or recruitment,” Savarese said.

Kentucky issued a short release Saturday saying that Bledsoe’s high school grades, which varied widely between his junior and senior years, had been cleared by the NCAA, which has sent investigators to at least three places in Alabama to ask about him.