O’Neil: NCAA-type enforcement now needed for Washington high school football

Blame for the alleged Bellevue football scandal reaches far and wide: from coaches to the academic institute to the booster club. Even 710 ESPN Seattle’s Danny O’Neil wondered if he is slightly culpable for the role his role as a journalist.

“I’m one of the reporters who may have been negligent on this,” he said while hosting the “Tom and Curley Show.” “I covered their first high school state championship back in 2001 and I was so smitten with the trophy apparently … no, Butch Goncharoff is a great coach. I think the football experience that the kids have there, even the kids that have come maybe from outside the district, is an incredible experience for them. The separate question: Is it appropriate what has gone on around it?”

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The 78-page report found that Bellevue administrators ignored rules and the team’s head coach told football players to enroll in an alternative school where boosters subsidized their tuition. Findings included emails, interviews, and other district documents, according to the report. Administrators tried to obstruct the investigation, which was written by two former prosecutors hired by the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association.

Members of the Bellevue Wolverines Football Club have denied the allegations, with club president John Connors telling Dori Monson that the report is “insulting and outrageous.”

O’Neil says it’s possible that the booster president is technically correct: the boosters never specifically gave a check to the academic institute or to sponsor a specific player to get his grades up. And they probably did want to sincerely help some students. Still, what he sees is a system that’s been put in place to skirt the rules.

“(Connors) totally might be correct, but I would ask everybody to look at the totality of the situation and say, is that how you want high school athletics to function?” he said.

“It’s a portrait of high school athletics that, when I read through it, I felt sad, because it made me realize that we are just getting to a point where common sense can’t govern high school athletics anymore,” he added. “We’re going to have to have NCAA-type enforcement to punish, and then there’s the question of what happens next. It was depressing to me.”

O’Neil also felt it appropriate for the booster club, which is a nonprofit, to potentially be caught through a paper trail of nonprofit tax write-offs.

“I always struggle with the exact meaning of what irony is,” O’Neil said. “… I don’t know think it’s ironic, but maybe it’s poetic justice.”

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