Rush Propst, the embattled head football coach in Hoover, Ala., photographed in January. (Scott Gries/MTV)Even if you don’t live in “Friday Night Lights” territory yourself, you’ve surely gotten wind by now of how hugely high school football can loom in the life of thousands of communities across wide swaths of the country. No need to repeat here how the teams and the games become so freighted with hometown pride and expectation that the life of the whole community can sometimes seem to twist into a vortex around the playing field, or how the sport and those who take part in it — the players and, especially, the coaches — can be blown up much larger than life.
All of which goes to illuminate the problem they’re grappling with in Hoover, Ala., where the Board of Eduction met in special session this afternoon. Hoover is something of a powerhouse in Alabama football, you see — five state Class 6A championships in the last seven years, featured on MTV’s “Two-a-Days” program — and the team seems playoff-bound again this year, with three games left to play. But it’s getting awfully hard to paint the head coach, Rush Propst, as the paragon of sportsmanship, can-do spirit and small-town American values that is called for in the script.
Well, the can-do part maybe he’s still got. Much of the controversy that has been swirling around Mr. Propst for months seems to concern things that football fans might shrug off as mere excesses of zeal (complaints of recruiting violations, fixing grades for players and the like) or as excesses of gravy-training (allegations of unreported income from running training camps, free personal use of a truck supplied by a local auto dealer, and so on). Unethical, maybe, but not necessarily criminal, and to hear Mr. Propst’s lawyer tell it, hardly uncommon.
All that stuff is laid out in a lengthy investigative report (pdf) prepared for the school district by a Birmingham law firm back in August and released over the weekend. The coach denied any impropriety in the way he ran the team.
But wait. There’s more. What’s this about a second family?
Look way back on page 63 of the 68-page report from the lawyers:
It is widely reputed in St. Clair County, where Propst formerly was a head football coach at Ashville, that he has had for many years a not-so-secret second family, now residing in the Pell City area. Propst’s bank account records – which he allowed us to review, though not obligated to do so – reflect that he has been providing financial support for this family. In our interview with him during this investigation – which occurred after newspaper reports of such accusations – he declined to make any comment about this matter, stating simply that he had dealt with it with the persons involved.
We have not attempted to fully explore these accusations. From what we have learned from several reliable sources, we believe they are true.
The lawyers go on to say that they found scant evidence that whatever the coach may have been up to in St. Clair County had had any direct impact on the Hoover football program. Likewise with an alleged affair between the coach and an assistant principal who figures in some of the reported episodes of favored treatment of players, an affair that the supposed participants evidently neither confirmed nor denied when confronted with questions. (The coach has refused to comment to reporters on his private life.)
In both situations, the report found signs that some school officials knew about what was going on and tried to keep it under wraps, presumably in hopes of avoiding a scandal that might cost the school Coach Propst’s services.
And there we get to the reason for much of the outrage that has blown up over this whole matter, and for The Lede’s interest in the case. From the look of things, some in the Hoover school system were willing to bend way, way over backward for a long time to accommodate a winning coach who, at the very least, seems to have been less than assiduous about adhering to all kinds of rules, from the norms of marital fidelity to financial propriety to academic integrity to the ethics of his profession, such as they may be.
As it all spills out in public now anyway, it’s undercutting the usual justification offered for the gargantuan amounts of time, energy and tax money that are consumed across the country every year by high school football — that the sport builds character.
When a Hoover school official suggested putting off dealing with the mess until after the football season ends in December, back came complaints that once again pursuit of a trophy was being put ahead of doing the right thing. This week, the state high school athletic association began investigating whether this year’s team included an ineligible player, the Hoover school superintendent asked the state ethics commission to investigate Coach Propst, and that assistant principal was reassigned, prompting her to say she would quit at the end of the school year, according to The Birmingham News.
The coach himself still has his job. But the win-at-any-cost mentality is starting to run up quite a price tag at Hoover High
