Bellevue football club president is ‘insulted’ over ‘outrageous’ investigation

Update

The Seattle Times reports 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. Washington Interscholastic Activities Association rules state that there is a $500 limit on payments to coaches during the season. But club president John Connors told the Times that the money was given to the coach outside of the football season, making it OK.

Between 2008-12, the club paid at least $312,059 to Bellevue coaches.

Original story

The Bellevue High School football program has been scrutinized for some time, now officially with a report filled with allegations — some of which target the booster club.

John Connors, president of the Bellevue Wolverine Football Club, has strong feelings about the report.

“This report is full of allegations, inferences, and it’s about the worst work I’ve ever seen,” Connors said. “It’s outrageous. It’s insulting and outrageous.”

Related: Bellevue football parents oppose investigation: ‘It’s about being black in Bellevue’

The highly-anticipated report detailing a controversial investigation into Bellevue High School’s football team is 68 pages and alleges that the district’s administrators ignored rules. It also states that coach Butch Goncharoff told football players to enroll in an alternative school where the football club would subsidize their tuition. Other claims state that athletes received subsidized housing to gain eligibility.

But it is clear that the relationship between investigators and the football club was tense. Connors only had negative feedback for KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson.

“I can unilaterally say that is false and malicious. Butch and I have never discussed, he has never asked, I’ve never been approached by a parent. I’ve never given a cent to a parent or a kid,” Connors said. “Other than one kid that Butch self-reported, when a father came to him at Thanksgiving and said he didn’t have any food. Butch said he gave him $300 because he said he didn’t have any food. Any implication that any of the booster members gave money to kids, or that a coach gave money to kids is irresponsible.”

Connors said that the football club donates to multiple organizations, including the alternative school where many students attended and also played for the football team. But the club never had any say on where funds were directed, Connors said.

“It’s actually quite a good school that many parents in our community send their kids to. Fortunately, they have the means to pay for it. A lot of lower-income kids don’t,” Connors said. “It’s completely up to the discretion of the school of how to use those funds. We never directed it toward athletes.”

Despite what investigators claim — that the administration, coaches and the football club were not cooperative with their efforts — Connors argues that they all were until they became uncomfortable with the direction of the case.

“We cooperated and provided plenty of information. Initially, I agreed to meet in person, but once they started the investigation, spent several months — the conduct of the investigation, the scope and their treatment of people, we concluded there was nothing to be gained by meeting with these folks,” he said. “We submitted information in writing, in great detail, on all the topics in the scope of the investigation. We fully cooperated.”

“These folks had no intent of having an open and honest fact-finding mission. It was clear from the outset that their intent, in a media interview, was to level the playing field,” Connors said. “Secondly, they were contacting the media during the investigation … that’s when I said, ‘there is no chance I’m talking with someone in contact with the media during an investigation.’”

That sentiment bled over into the investigation with parents and students, which Connors alleges was not pleasant.

“Further, with the way they were treating our kids, our parents, in particular the black kids in our community — targeting them — there was no way we were going to allow them to continue that pattern,” he said.

One of the investigators, Robert Westinghouse, told KIRO Radio that they simply followed the facts. Fellow investigator Carl Blackstone said that following the facts was difficult. Unlike other clients they’ve had — such as Washington Governor Jay Inslee, Seattle and Tacoma schools — the Bellevue district, coaching staff or the football club were not cooperative with them.

Blackstone points to one example of a football camp at Fort Warden. Investigators note that the cost of the camp was suspicious.

“We see nothing to indicate these payments were proper. With the Fort Warden Camp, typically the boosters were paying $20,000 a year for that camp. In 2008, they said the payments went up to $80,000 — that’s a 400 percent increase from one year to the next,” Blackstone said. “We find it hard to believe that the cost of that camp really went up 400 percent.”

“We think it’s a fair inference is that some of that money was funneled to the coaches in the form of payment,” he said. “But the booster club wouldn’t cooperate with us, Coach Goncharoff would not answer any of our questions about whether he received payments from the booster club.”

The school district has now set up a special email address jsut for public commentary on the issues surrounding the investigation and report: feedback@bsd405.org.

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