Bellevue Football Club president doesn’t know why ‘WIAA would lie’

Bellevue Football Club president John Connors asserts that the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association’s extensive report claiming there is evidence of misconduct and insufficient oversight for the football team is both sensationalized and flawed. But when KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson asked why the nonprofit oversight organization would lie about the state’s most successful team, Connor was at a loss.

“I don’t know why they would lie or why (the information) would be incomplete,” Connors said Wednesday. “And so I think you’ll find as we continue down this process … that there were multiple egregious errors and misstatements in the WIAA report and you’ll be surprised when you see that.”

Related: Don O’Neill: Bellevue football coach should receive lifetime ban

The hotly debated investigation of the Bellevue High School football program started with a Seattle Times investigation that led to WIAA’s damning report.

The WIAA found no documentable cases of coaches or boosters recruiting for Bellevue football but found “irrefutable evidence” of multiple infractions, including that football players gave false addresses so they could attend Bellevue High School.

Connors said he doesn’t have access to student records, but called the assertion “wildly sensational and misleading.” He says WIAA claims to have a list of 42 students with false addresses, but that nobody knows where the list came from. He said Bellevue parents have found that the list includes students who have lived in Bellevue their whole lives, transfers to Bellevue from junior high, transfers who began as ninth graders, kids moving from out-of-state and some students already cleared by WIAA.

“The notion that there are 42 transfers that have eligible addresses is completely false,” he said.

But Dori said WIAA’s report only seems to say that they found evidence of 10-15 instances of phony addresses, and expects that at least that many were being used by Bellevue football players.

“I would wait and let the Bellevue School District respond to that because it’s the district and high school’s responsibility to review addresses and verify them,” he said. “I’m pretty sure that the way Bellevue High School operates, they’ve done everything in their power to make sure that kids who are eligible are on the football team.”

Dori, who is a high school girl’s basketball coach, said he’s only had two students transfer in and four out for his team in the past seven years.

“At Bellevue, it’s just influx,” Dori said.

“That was a number aggregated over multiple years and when the real number is revealed of how many kids were truly transfers, it’s a smaller number,” Connors responded. “The number of kids who will be problems, I’m sure is a very tiny fraction over a seven-year period.”

But Dori noted that even one phony address being used is a problem. Connors agreed, to a point.

“You wouldn’t want to see that happen, but I can guarantee you in the Bellevue schools, particularly Newport and Bellevue High, there are lots of people trying to get into those schools for a whole host of reasons: academic reasons, athletic reasons, the community reasons,” he said. “So I don’t think the football program is any kind of outlier for either Newport or Bellevue High School.”

As for the Seattle Times’ claims that Academic Institute, an expensive for-profit alternative school, is a “diploma mill” to get students on the football team, Connors called the assertion a “pretty narrow characterization of this alternative school.” He pointed to other similar institutes in Mercer Island and Woodinville.

“AI is no different than these schools,” he said. “Further, it’s actually quite an astoundingly good school. It’s been in business for 35 years.”

Connors also called allegations that Jeff Razore, VP of the football club and volunteer assistant football coach, paid the tuition of a couple football players “absolutely not factual.”

“This is another example of the WIAA report where they infer rather than having real evidence of what occurred,” he said.

Related: Rob McKenna told there was ‘no scope’ to Bellevue football investigation

Then there is the matter of money. The Times reported that the Bellevue Wolverine Football Club paid Bellevue High School football Coach Butch Goncharoff $60,000 a year for jobs unrelated to coaching during the football season. WIAA rules state that there is a $500 limit on payments to coaches during the season, but Connors says the money was given to the coach outside of the football season, making it perfectly within the WIAA’s codified rules.

“What I think is really interesting is in the WIAA report, and their subsequent reporting, why did they leave out the words ‘in a season’ that are in the rules,” he said. “Why would you do that?”

As for why the district, parents and club leaders decided not to continue cooperating with the investigation, Connors said the WIAA went beyond the five things that were agreed upon for the scope of the investigation, which he says they had no right to do.

“It’s almost as if someone doesn’t have a Fourth, Fifth, or Sixth Amendment Constitutional right dealing with these folks,” he said. “What will be proven is that there was no violation by the coaches, no violation by the club and no violation by the district. A coach can be paid for a host of things out of season, and it’s widely done all over KingCo Conference, all over the state.”

Follow @http://twitter.com/Mynorthwest