Months after Hayfield Secondary School’s football team withdrew from the playoffs, Fairfax County Public Schools is crafting a plan that it hopes will improve its athletic processes and transparency ahead of the next school year.
Last spring, Hayfield was accused of violating recruiting rules, and ultimately withdrew from the postseason after playing in just one game. The program was scrutinized, and as a result of the controversy, Virginia’s largest school system launched both an internal and external review of its athletics rules and policies.
Tom Horn, the district’s executive director of activities and athletics programs, said a working group of principals, coaches and others is working with the Virginia High School League to craft a plan it wants to have in place for the next school year.
Some of the plan, Horn told WTOP, will address “training gaps,” because different coaches and school employees have been receiving different levels of training.
“The process is being different among the 25 high schools based on the personnel and the personalities of those buildings, so identifying that we need greater consistency among the 25 and identifying where those training gaps exist is the work we’ve done,” Horn said.
The inconsistencies, Horn said, are the result of there not being a “massive training ground” for Virginia High School League eligibility rules.
Those rules are tied to the VHSL’s handbook, but “if we have registrars and school counselors that have never met the Virginia High School League staff or never gone to a Virginia High School League training, then there’s a gap in their knowledge and understanding of the Virginia High School League rules and policies around transfer and residency,” he said.
An external probe of the district’s eligibility and transfer policies is expected to provide recommendations for the division to consider, Horn said. The county’s also using the internal review to find things it can change immediately.
“We need better paperwork, better checklists, better rubrics in-house, and we can fix those right away,” Horn said.
The VHSL may also propose new regulations, he said, which could also lead to a change in training or processes.
Superintendent Michelle Reid, who has publicly apologized for how the division handled the Hayfield allegations, said it’s a time for “all of us to pause, reevaluate the rules and regulations we have in place and make sure that the rules and regulations we have in place are going to work for our student-athletes moving forward.”
Hayfield’s program was scrutinized after then-coach Darryl Overton was accused of violating recruiting rules by allegedly encouraging his former players from Freedom High School in Woodbridge to transfer. Overton was in his first season leading the Fairfax County school.
Overton is still working as a security specialist at Hayfield, Reid said, but has since taken a coaching job with The St. James Performance Academy as its director of football, the academy announced.
Asked whether school system staff had encouraged Overton to pursue a new role, Reid declined to comment, explaining it was a personnel matter.
Horn said all of the school system’s coaching contracts are only one-year long, and “any time we change a head coach, we anticipate changes on the staff.”
Hiring processes for coaches is consistent across all 25 schools, Horn said. They advertise a position, collect resumes and then put together a hiring panel.
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