Hayfield High's season from hell is done. The Alexandria, Va., school's leaders tried adopting the winningest football program in the state from a school in another county and damn near got away with it. But Hayfield's messy 2024 campaign ended last night, just one day after intrepid local reporters published text messages from the school's athletic director indicating that Hayfield administrators had considered using "homeless" designations for out-of-district players in order to get around athletic eligibility rules.
Monday night, Michelle Reid, the superintendent of Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) and overseer of a massive and misguided effort to stifle news about the Hayfield debacle all year, announced that Hayfield had withdrawn from the Virginia state playoffs. That came after state athletic authorities had suspended the team from participating in the postseason, only to have a county judge issue an emergency injunction reinstating the team. But that injunction became moot, and Hayfield's removal was made inevitable by recent developments about administrators' comportment. The school's AD, Monty Fritts, has already resigned as his sordid role in the debacle went public. Reid's statement claimed that Hayfield principal Darin Thompson was the one who withdrew the team.
Hayfield's 2024 team relied on transfers brought in by new head coach Darryl Overton, who had previously coached at Freedom High, a school from Prince William County, Va., that had won the last two state championships and was nationally ranked. The Virginia High School League (VHSL), a Charlottesville-based non-profit that serves as the sanctioning body for scholastic sports in the Old Dominion, found that 24 new players came to Hayfield with Overton.
VHSL rules generally prohibit transferring for athletic purposes. But for reasons that remain a mystery, since last spring Reid ran interference for Thompson, Fritts, and Overton—the architects of Hayfield's pre-fab state championship team all season long—allowing Hayfield to wreak havoc on all the other schools the superintendent is also supposed to look out for. The Hawks went 10-0 against fellow FCPS schools, and outscored opponents 633-20 in those games. Hayfield was up 75-0 in the first half of its first-round playoff game last week, on the way to a 75-7 win. In that same half, Hayfield's offense had more touchdowns called back because of penalty (four) than its public school opponents had scored all season. Nobody in the stadium seemed to be enjoying themselves, like all other Hayfield games I watched this year.
Hayfield's second-round game was scheduled for Tuesday night at home against Fairfax. But that game will not be played, and Fairfax will be awarded a forfeit. The beginning of the end to the Hawks' season came when the Fairfax County Times published a series of text messages from January 2024 from Fritts to another county school's football coach. The texts were obtained by FC Times reporters Sravan Gannavarapu and Asra Q. Nomani, who will go down as the Woodward and Bernstein of the scandal. The texts find Fritts discussing the then-imminent hiring of the Freedom coach, saying that principal Thompson "really wants Overton," and boasting that Hayfield would be getting "about 10 new starters" if the school landed the coach.
Overton had to forfeit two wins in 2021 for using ineligible players. The text exchange reveals that Fritts believed bringing in Overton, even with all his baggage, would be worth the trouble: "I like to win," Fritts wrote. "And make money."
The real bombshell of the Fairfax Times's texts comes when the unidentified coach tells Fritts that it's going to be hard to replicate a program like Freedom's at Hayfield, implying rules are harder to get around at a Fairfax County school than in Prince William County. Fritts responds: "There would need to be some change, but if they are homeless, nothing can happen." And Fritts's very next text contained only laughing emojis.
The federal edict known as the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, promulgated in 1987, gives school districts a mandate to allow homeless kids to enroll. High school football coaches, Overton among them, have been accused of exploiting loopholes in that law to bring athletes into schools they otherwise would not be able to attend. Fritts's texts about using the law designed to protect homeless kids to bring in football players made it appear as if Hayfield was intent on importing a dominant football team by any means necessary.
News about what was happening at Hayfield, the majority of it coming from the FC Times, was making Reid look bad. In late summer she called a town hall meeting, at which she declared that all the accusations floating around about illegal recruiting and ineligible students playing for the school had already been investigated by the county and found to be "unsubstantiated." Reid gave Thompson and Overton a very public vote of confidence at the meeting, then ended the gathering when constituents began asking questions about how she arrived at her conclusion.
Reid, however, never released a report on the alleged investigation. FCPS denied Defector's FOIA request filed last month for documents related to the investigation. But in response Reid's agency refused to turn over any paperwork, claiming the investigation was "conducted by an external organization" and so the state's public records law didn’t apply.
Reid tried to keep up that nothing-to-see-here tack until the end. Last week, a day after Defector's overview story on the Hayfield scandal, Reid released a long and fact-free statement that she said was needed "to address the continued—and troubling—misinformation being shared regarding this high school football season, and more specifically about the Hayfield Hawks football team."
Defector asked FCPS spokesman Julie Allen last week for any example of the misinformation Reid referred to in her statement. Allen said via email that FCPS was preparing an answer. But no such answer came. After additional emails requesting the same thing, Allen referred the matter to fellow FCPS spokesperson Steven Brasley, who said he was working on getting an answer. Yesterday, when there was still no comment about what misinformation led to Reid releasing her statement, Defector again emailed FCPS, which garnered an auto-response from Brasley: "I am out of the office and will return on Tuesday, December 10," it said.
Reid's declaration last night that Hayfield's season was over indicates that misinformation wasn't really the problem. In announcing the latest chapter in this season-long saga, the superintendent described kicking the team out of the playoffs as a "hard decision." Actually, the recent developments made that seem inevitable. Slightly harder decisions come now, as Thompson decides whether Overton keeps his job, Reid decides if Thompson keeps his, and county residents decide if Reid keeps hers.
