BEIJING — A Chinese high school principal has admitted his girls' soccer team was filled with players from the junior national squad and apologized for the fraud, state media reported Friday.

Daping Junior High's Zhang Jianling said that only three of the 15 team members sent to an international girls tournament in Turkey actually attended his school in the Yuzhong district of the western city of Chongqing.

"The fraud and cheating produced an enormous negative effect on the image of the country, of Chongqing, and of Yuzhong," ZhangZhang, who received an administrative demerit from the city's board of education, was quoted as saying by the Titan Sports newspaper.

Daping officials had initially denied Chinese media allegations of the fraud that appeared last week after the school's team beat a squad from a German high school in the tournament final.

According to the official regulations posted on the International School Sport Federation's Web site, players were required to be enrolled full time at the schools they played for.

It wasn't immediately clear whether the tournament organizers had been notified of the fraud or whether Daping would return the trophy. Calls to the school and the Yuzhong board of education went unanswered Friday.

The scandal has focused an unflattering light on allegations of systemic cheating in Chinese sports through falsifying athletes' credentials, usually at the behest of coaches or state sports officials.

Several of China's gold medal-winning female gymnasts at last year's Olympics were widely suspected of being underage and therefore not qualified to compete. They were later cleared by officials of the sport's world governing body.

Earlier this year, about 20 percent of 15,000 young Chinese athletes were revealed to have falsely reported their ages. Yi Jianlian of the NBA's New Jersey Nets is also accused of having falsified his age on Chinese documents to make him appear younger and therefore qualified for junior tournaments.