This past Sunday, Brenden Hughes, a new wide receiver coach and passing game coordinator for the Hayfield Secondary School football team in Alexandria, tweeted at 4:36 p.m., urging student-athletes to “get some work Monday and Tuesday this week” with training at “$25 a session!”
The problem: as Hughes even acknowledged in his post, this week is a “dead period,” a term used in high school athletics to describe a week of rest when the Virginia High School League, which oversees high school athletics in the state, prohibits coaches from training. Coaches also can’t charge players for private sessions during the week. Hughes told players to “DM me for location,” and it isn’t clear where he held the training. The VHSL also prohibits the use of fields managed by school districts for private coaching activities during “dead week,” which runs from July 1 through July 7 this year.
Community members immediately questioned Hughes about the appropriateness of the planned training, one asking publicly, “Do you guys follow any rules?”
At 8:58 p.m., Hughes responded defiantly, writing, “Here you go again, you know what [sic] Yall have been very nosey, you don’t know where I’m training or if I’m even charging my players [sic] get out of my mentions. Yall are getting weird.”
A person familiar with the training said that Hughes wasn’t training or charging Hayfield players. VHSL didn’t respond to a request for comment. This incident is the latest in a series of concerns that have emerged, along with recently reported questions about alleged recruitment improprieties by new Hayfield Secondary School head football coach Darryl Overton and his staff, with the transfers of an estimated 30-plus students from area schools, including Woodbridge’s Freedom High School in neighboring Prince William County, where Overton was last coach. The controversy underscores a longer history with Overton’s “Dark Side” coaching strategy, as he calls it, allegedly flouting regulations, something that cast a shadow over his tenure at Freedom, where his teams won two state championships.
The Fairfax County Times has learned that long before he started at Hayfield, Prince William County Public Schools officials repeatedly investigated Overton, by his admission “17 times,” about the transfer of student-athletes onto the Freedom football roster during his nine seasons coaching the team since 2015 and other issues. According to sources, there is a growing belief among observers that Overton uses the transfer system like “fantasy football,” where, if a certain position is in need of talent, he would go to Prince William County or another school system and recruit a player to transfer to Hayfield and fill the position.
In an interview in February with a local sports journalist, Overton lamented that while Freedom High School has a high number of students who leave, “I’ve been investigated…17 times about the 27 that transferred in.” It’s understood that while Overton was literally investigated 17 times by Prince William County Public Schools officials, it was not specifically about “27” transfers. However, the recruitment issue was one area of inquiry.
In choosing to move to Hayfield, Overton noted, “Go where you’re celebrated, not tolerated.”
A spokeswoman for Prince William County Public Schools said, “We do not comment on personnel matters.”
According to VHSL policy 28-6-2, any student who has enrolled in one high school and subsequently enrolls in another high school without a corresponding change of residence of his/her parent(s) or guardian will be ineligible for VHSL activities for 365 days. The policy, according to documents, is designed to discourage recruiting and transfers for athletic reasons and encourage students to live with their parents and be enrolled in school continuously in their home districts. As reported, another VHSL rule, 27-9, bans “proselytizing” that leads to students transferring based on “athletic ability.”
Ironically, in a recent YouTube video defending Overton, three former Freedom parents said that they transferred their sons to Hayfield this spring specifically to play football under Overton, not for the academics. One mother said that her son told her about Overton’s transfer, and then he remarked, “Yeah, so, we have to move.”
The mother said she responded, “Oh, okay.”
Soon enough, she said, they moved to a new apartment in the Hayfield school district so her son could continue to play football under “Coach O,” as she called him.
Another mother, sitting next to her, said her son also followed Overton to Hayfield for his football program. About Overton, she gushed, “I got his back 100%.”
An FCPS official repeated the statement the school district issued last week about the controversy, stating, “The specific concerns regarding student transfers that have been shared with Fairfax County Public Schools remain under review by a team from several FCPS departments. We want to ensure that this review is thorough and fair to all of the students, staff, and families involved.”
In his recent YouTube interview, Overton said that students had transferred to Freedom for the academics, not the athletics, stating, “Nobody transfers to play football. They transfer to participate in the specialty program.” A “specialty program” at Freedom is the Center for Environmental and Natural Sciences, a four-year academic track run by biology teacher Jessica Doiran, whom Overton described as an “amazing specialty program coordinator.” It’s a “pre-Governor School Program” with rigorous advanced placement courses in biology and math, and students who are not districted to go to Freedom High School are allowed to apply to join every year.
Asked about specialty program enrollment and athletes, the PWCPS spokeswoman only said, “Students who are granted approval to transfer to a school outside their established attendance area shall be eligible to participate in Virginia High School League activities when entering the school as a first-time ninth grader or as a 10th grade student entering a specialty program for the first time. Any further transferring without a corresponding address will result in a 365-day period of ineligibility.”
Sources familiar with Overton’s history as a coach say that he practices a philosophy of asking for forgiveness later rather than first asking for permission. For example, the Fairfax County Times reported last week that the Virginia State Corporation Commission listed Playmakers Elite Athletic Training, a youth sports fitness and training nonprofit organization established by Overton, with an “entity status” of “Inactive” and its legal status as “Automatically Terminated” for not filing its annual report in 2023.
According to documents filed with the commission, Playmaker Elite’s annual 2023 report was filed at 10:17 a.m. on June 28. At 10:42 a.m., the registration fee of $50 was paid, and the legal status soon after changed to “Active” and “In Good Standing.”
In another controversy, people familiar with the situation at Hayfield have told the Fairfax County Times that Overton has transferred some students from Freedom to Hayfield by designating them as “homeless” under a federal law, the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, passed in 1987 to provide federal funds to support homeless students and guarantee them immediate enrollment in a school.
As reported, Hayfield saw a dramatic increase in students after Overton’s arrival, with a net gain of 23 students from March to June. This means the raw number of transfers was much higher when accounting for students dropping out. Fairfax County Public Schools refused to release the numbers on precisely how many students arrived at Hayfield and how many students were identified as homeless.
Instead, an FCPS spokeswoman forwarded the request for the data to the school district’s office to handle requests for public records under the Freedom of Information Act, which demands government agencies release information under a specific timeline. The PWCPS spokeswoman also did the same. Pushing the requests to FOIA officers usually delays answers by at least two weeks. It is a common tactic that school district officials have implemented in recent years, turning even simple requests by the media into bureaucratic juggernauts.
The issues raised by this scandal in northern Virginia underscore a wider national problem that is largely a well-kept secret in high school athletics. In 2017, in a rare expose on the issue, the Seattle Times published an investigative series about how the goal of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act “has been turned upside down” for a “growing number of Seattle athletes,” with student-athletes moved “from school to school, following celebrity coaches and dreams of stardom” and the law “used to exploit their hopes.” The reporter noted that “when sports end, many of these students find themselves adrift.”
In Seattle, the number of football and basketball players identified as homeless and exempted from grade and/or school rules regarding transfer grew 163%, from 49 students in 2013 to 129 students in 2017. That year, a sports website, The Big Lead, called using homeless status “the best new loophole in high school recruiting rules.” Forbes followed up with a column noting that the “youth sports system finds a way to exploit law meant to protect homeless students.” As a result of the investigation, the Seattle school district recognized that it had deficiencies in its review of homeless students.
Dubious athletic transfers also make headline news nationwide. In 2016, state athletic authorities sanctioned Bellevue High in Washington state for having players with fake addresses.
For some local football watchers, the controversy is getting unseemly. Last week, as reported, @SamsonTheBadGuy, a host of Local Locker Room News, discussed the case in a YouTube video, revealing text messages he’d received between Overton and the son of a Hayfield mother, Regina Dorsey, who blew the whistle on concerns she has about alleged recruitment issues, as well as charges of bullying by coaches. The texts chronicled Overton getting the boy a McDonald’s meal and engaging in seemingly friendly text exchanges.
The YouTube host,
@SamsonTheBadGuy, told the Fairfax County Times that the texts arrived through a private texting app, and he doesn’t know who sent them. “I just had questions about what happened. I’m not taking sides. I don’t want to see any kids hurt,” he said.
He has since set the video to private.
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I have no skin anymore in this game, my kids graduated from West Potomac, a rival of Hayfield, but my question is, why is MY tax money that I pay into FFx Co., paying for kids who live in Prince William Co to go to a high school in Fairfax Co. so that Hayfield can have the best players? Let’s lay this on the line… What kind of BS is this? Citizens of Ffx co should be pissed off as well. I don’t know who this “Overton” person is, but you can keep your players in the county they live in and pay taxes in. This needs to go to a higher level than the superintendent of Ffx Co, perhaps the Governor’s office needs to know about the games Hayfield is playing to satisfy this coach & school.
Leave this man and the school alone. Ironically enough the parameters to post in this discussion list being truthful in your posts. The authors that clearly have some vendetta are doing the opposite of that or at the best are using journalistic tricks that hide the truth. For instance, they tout 30 ish transfers to Hayfield and looked it all up in public record. Guess what? Hayfield has been recognized nationally as a Purple Heart school for their military involvement and support for military connected students. Yet these hack job “journalists” are assuming that all transfers since Overton arrived are football players and not band kids or drama kids – two extremely talented and decorated programs at Hayfield. At the end of the day, if a parent chooses to move their student for a specific coach or teacher or culture, that is their prerogative – especially since it happens elsewhere and if it is done correctly. There is no way that Hayfield would allow students to register without the proper documentation etc. Stop trashing and defaming a good school. It reeks of sour grapes, just like the “whistle blower” who couldn’t be team mom and already tried to transfer her kid “to play for Coach O” when he was at Freedom.
There are like ten major red flags for him and how he conducts his program. Stop glossing over them all to focus on one mom
Unbiased… More like “stick my head in the sand”. I’m going to start selling bumper stickers to parents at Madison High School & Highland Springs that say “Actual Virginia Class 6 State Champions” and “Hayfield: We came for the arts! 😉”… You have to be kidding me… This Overton guy is to Virginia high school sports as Barry Bonds is to MLB; everyone is doing it, but he was dumb enough to get caught. His ego is his downfall. No one is untouchable. Freedom should voluntarily vacate their state football championships & Hayfield should have to forfeit every football game from this day forward as long as Coach Barry Overton is at the helm. I have a feeling this courageous reporting is just the tip of the iceberg. Things are about to get a lot worse for anyone who hitched their wagons to Overton. I don’t care if you’re an anklebiter football coach or at a big name private school, any justification of Overton’s actions are contrary to fundamentals of amateur sports. Overton has sullied the reputation of an otherwise fine high school. I hope all of those military families at Fort Belvoir read these articles and make the decision to send their kids to another FCPS school.
Commenting on the above comment regarding the MoneyDolly fundraiser. For some reason I can’t comment directly under the original comment.
I visited their MoneyDolly and I’m extremely concerned as it states some of the money fundraised will be used to pay for HUDL. Well that’s a lie. The activities office pays for that service out their funds. And I believe it’s a contract so it’ll be funneled through finance and a PO. Additionally, Football doesn’t and has never paid to maintain the fields. Hmmmmmm. Can someone please find the money trail. This ain’t passing the sniff test.
Has anyone said who kept the $29,630 raised on MoneyDolly.com by Coach O for the Hayfield football program? Hayfield said in an email they don’t use third parties for fundraising. Before anyone points out it’s $2800. Add up the contributions, below the listed total. Follow the money. https://supporter.moneydolly.com/fundraiser/101622/participant/516687/order?utm_source=app&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=share_fund_details
Thank you for keeping this story alive. Unfortunately, FCPS isn’t going to take action since Hayfield’s principal, Dr. Thompson, has a close personal relationship with the Assistant Superintendent of this district, Dr Boyd. She has known for months about the situation but continues to protect the Principal, AD, and Coach. She only began doing the bare minimum when the media got involved. It’s so sad that this has been allowed to happen and people in positions of power look the other way. You may also want to look into the amount of teachers and staff who left Hayfield at the end of this school year. Dr. Thompson has created a difficult environment for everyone. My heart is broken for the kids at Hayfield. Bad leadership all the way around.
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