AD asks committee to change ruling

Updated: May 21, 2014, 3:50 PM ET

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Leticia Romero: Transfer Troubles

"Outside The Lines" examines the issues surrounding Leticia Romero's request to transfer from Kansas State.Tags: Leti Romero, Leticia Romero, Kansas State, WCBB, Transfer, Deb Patterson, Kamie Ethridge, Paula Lavigne, John Currie, Pat Bosco

Kansas State athletic director John Currie has sent a letter asking for a school committee that had denied Wildcats player Leticia Romero's request to transfer to reconsider its decision, ESPN's "Outside the Lines" has learned.

In the letter, dated May 5, Currie wrote to committee chairman Dr. Pat Bosco that "new information regarding student-athlete Leticia Romero" had become available. It also said, "I believe it is in this student-athlete's best interest for the committee to reconvene to consider this new information and potentially approve her request for a conditional transfer release."

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Kansas State's decision to reject Leticia Romero's transfer request has harmed its reputation and put a foreign teenage student-athlete through nearly two months of stress and uncertainty, Mechelle Voepel writes.Story

Romero, a guard from the Canary Islands who led the Kansas State team in scoring, rebounding, assists and steals last season, asked for a release from her scholarship after the school fired head coach Deb Patterson in March.

Romero said that when she asked to transfer, the school asked her to draw up a list of possible schools. She gave the school approximately 100 schools, all of which were denied by the school's compliance office.

Romero appealed her decision to a school review committee and was denied a second time. She said she had no interest in following her former coaches, who ended up at Northern Colorado -- a school that wasn't on Romero's list of 100.

"No," she told OTL. "And I, before I make my decision, I didn't even know if they were looking for jobs, where they were going to go. I didn't know anything. My decision was based on my feelings, on how I felt."

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AP Photo/Waco Tribune Herald/Rod AydelotteWith a release, Leticia Romero could transfer to a D-I school and receive scholarship money while sitting out the required year. Without the release, she would have to pay all her own expenses that year.

She met with Currie after the review committee's decision. In that meeting, she told Currie that she was not going to follow her former coaches to Northern Colorado. Currie's letter to Bosco quotes Romero as saying, "I am not planning to go with any of them."

In his letter, Currie said he had concerns that former staff members had tampered with Romero about her transfer but that she denied it.

Romero told OTL that Currie was sympathetic but said his hands were tied.

"What he said was, 'I want you to be released. [New] Coach [Jeff] Mittie wants you to be released. The athletic department wants you to be released. But now this is not on my hands. It's in the committee's hands. I can't do anything about it,'" Romero told OTL.

Kansas State officials have offered to release Romero to a handful of schools not on her list. Romero says she's not interested in any of those schools because of the caliber of their programs.