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B&F: Asra Nomani breaks down, and breaks news on, the Hayfield HS football scandalplay icon
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B&F: Asra Nomani breaks down, and breaks news on, the Hayfield HS football scandal

Lou DiPietro
By Lou DiPietroNov 26, 2024
Lou DiPietro
Lou DiPietro is the Senior Content Producer for WFAN.com. Throughout his career, Lou has been part of coverage teams for the Stanley Cup Finals,…
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Asra Nomani – who was once JP Finlay’s professor at Georgetown, fun fact – has been on top of the entire Hayfield HS Football scandal for the Fairfax Times, and last week, in a text to JP, she promised to come on this week with some bombshell new details.

Those dropped Monday – text messages that showed AD Monty Fritts knew what was going on, leading to Hayfield being pulled from the VHSL playoffs and Fritts resigning his post – and as promised, Nomani joined BMitch & Finlay Tuesday to explain how she, in JP’s words, ‘took down a con job by a high school football team.’

“Reporting is reporting, and the saying goes ‘all politics is local,’ so everything is about corruption, vested interests, and money; follow the money and power, and so you can apply that to any story, and we all know sports has it in spades,” Nomani said. “What we just uncovered this weekend is that the athletic director knew Coach Overton was going to bring some transfers over, and the real smoking gun is he acknowledged that they were going to use this federal law that protects homeless students and gives them the right to be able to register into any school without having any questions asked about address to basically enroll players that shouldn't otherwise have been given authorization.”

To Nomani, this story speaks to all the questions people have about how transparent, and perhaps shady, the youth sports culture actually is these days, and what made BMitch incredulous is that the internal investigation FCPS did into Hayfield found a whole lot of nothing, but journalists did?

“I have some friends that went to Hayfield and they've been talking about information that, you know, I don't think anybody can look hard to find,” Brian said. “What kills me is that they say they had these so-called investigations, but they didn't find the stuff that popped out yesterday? So, the investigations were, I think, a big hoax and a bunch of lies, so the superintendent should be next.”

“You put your finger on it,” Nomani replied. “Back in June, a young reporter, Sravan (Gannavarapu), got a tip from a mom who had her son lose his spot on the Hayfield team, and she was asking what’s going on with all these new people in the locker room, and she’s raising questions and there’s retaliation. Sravan came with the story, and here we are six months later – and in those six months, Superintendent Michelle Reid stood in front of the parents and many of the team players and family members of Hayfield and said she supported the principal and the football coach. Lo and behold, now we see these text messages that nobody asked about or investigated, and we got it because Sravan just had really great sources in the community.”

At the time Nomani appeared, the AD, Monty Fritts, had put in for a two-year leave of absence, but he has reportedly since resigned, and to BMitch, pulling the team out of the playoffs was ‘too little too late,’ and now, we’re here where many people outside Hayfield have become collateral damage – especially after Hayfield was banned, then reinstated, and now pulled from the playoffs.

“I got the court records, and in October, the VHSL issued a decision that there were recruiting violations, after Fairfax County had cleared the school, and they put a two-year playoff ban on Hayfield – but I’ve just learned exclusively that Michelle Reid had the opportunity to negotiate and did negotiate a one-year ban, but then she took it to her counsel, John Foster, who said we can win this on appeal,” Nomani said. “They lost, and somehow, it gets even murkier: the outside counsel for the school district is representing the players and their families in court, pro bono he says, so he won a judge's decision allowing Hayfield to play in the playoffs. But this is a mess that could’ve been avoided many times over, and the principal was very much a part of the decision making to bring the coach to Hayfield.”

On Saturday, Fairfax will play the winner of tonight’s Lake Braddock-West Springfield game to determine the Class 6 Regional Champion, but for two of those three teams, as well as a dozen others, there’s no consolation for what’s gone on over the last half-year.

“The audacity of using a federal homelessness law…is that lost on these people?” JP asked incredulously. “What the hell are you doing to these children, and teaching these children, to go after a high school state football title?”

“That’s exactly what I always look back on; my son is 22 now, but I was the football team mom, I did the chain gang, I ran around the Beltway, so I get the chase,” Nomani said. “But something has happened to youth sports that is so corrupt. And so the issue in this is that it’s not just these boys who are not going to be playing in the playoffs, it’s that everyone knew, and Edison High School was slaughtered 75-7 in the first round, and we’ve seen in the texts the AD says he likes to win, and he likes money.”

Take a listen to Nomani’s entire call-in above.

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