For years, Timberlane High School has been New Hampshire’s premier wrestling program, winning 17 of the last 18 Division I state championships. But a report written by other wrestling coaches questions the program’s history of success and whether the school has recruited athletes from afar in violation of state rules.
The report sent to the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association identifies six former and current Timberlane wrestlers who moved to the school district from surrounding states such as Maine and Vermont. It points to possible recruitment and “questionable” residency of parents in the Timberlane School District who may have never actually moved to New Hampshire from their home states. Either would be a violation of the state’s athletic participation rules.
Among the athletes mentioned in the report are individual title winners and New England Champions. One is a three-time All-American. As a team, Timberlane has won 17 of the last 18 Division I championships and was part of a three-way tie for the title in 2000 with Concord and Salem. The program’s only loss in the championship round in that stretch came against Londonderry in 2015.
Concord High has been runner-up to Timberlane for the title 11 times since 2000.
The report is authored by Wes Decker and Nick Eddy, co-head coaches for Salem High wrestling with careers in law enforcement. Decker, a student and wrestler at Timberlane in the 1980s, is a retired Salem police sergeant who ran his own private investigation firm for seven years before going into corporate security. Eddy, a former detective in Windham, is currently a sergeant with the police department in Atkinson, one of the communities that Timberlane School District serves.
While the report is stirring conversations between coaches, the issue has already been settled in the eyes of the NHIAA, the governing body of high school sports in New Hampshire.
NHIAA Executive Director Jeff Collins told the Monitor on Wednesday that Timberlane conducted its own investigation of the allegations and submitted its own report to the governing body.
“The school and the district looked into this and (the wrestling program) was found to be in compliance,” Collins said. “We’re a self-reporting organization. The schools are the compliance officers. They looked into it to our satisfaction.”
In an email sent to 54 wrestling coaches on Monday – including longtime Timberlane head coach Barry Chooljian – Nashua South coach Adam Langlois wrote that the issue should continue to be discussed and addressed.
The report “appears to provide very strong evidence that there are athletes that do not reside in the state competing in our sport.” Langlois, who also serves as vice president of the state Wrestling Coaches Association, did not name Timberlane but repeatedly referenced the report accusing the district of wrongdoing and urged other coaches who had not read it to do so.
“For many years, there have been rumors and talk of recruiting by some member schools of this association and, to be quite frank, if you have been a wrestling coach for more than a few years in New Hampshire, it has been more of a well-known fact that for some reason we have all turned a blind eye,” Langlois wrote.
The report uses public information, mainly voting and property records, to support its claims that the athletes’ parents lived outside of the district while their children attended Timberlane.
NHIAA rules state that in order for an athlete to be eligible and establish a new residency, a family must move “all household properties to the new address and the parents and student(s) actually living there. A second family residence shall not meet the requirements of this standard.”
Chooljian, who has been inducted into NHIAA Hall of Fame and the New England Wrestling Hall of Fame, referred all comment to the school district offices when reached Thursday.
After Decker and Eddy completed their investigation in October, they sent it up the ladder to Salem athletic director Scott Insigna, who declined to share his thoughts on the report but said he passed it on to school principal Tracy Collyer.
Collyer declined to answer the Monitor’s questions on where the report went from her office, but it eventually reached Timberlane Regional School District and the desk of Superintendent Earl Metzler.
“The allegations came to us, and we went to the NHIAA,” said Metzler, who has served as the school district’s top administrator since 2012.
The NHIAA directed the school to look into the allegations against its own program.
“We turn these things back to the school and say ‘You need to look into this,’ ” Collins said.
Metzler said he delegated Timberlane Assistant Superintendent Roxanne Wilson and Human Resources Director Nancy Louiselle to oversee the investigation, which was completed in about two weeks.
For Timberlane, it was an open and shut case.
“They went through one by one and determined they were eligible,” Metzler said. “The claims were bogus.”
Metzler said Wilson and Louiselle “talked to as many people as they could, reaching out to parents, guardians, former students.”
“They got records to demonstrate they lived here and were legitimate student-wrestlers,” Metzler said.
While Metzler and the NHIAA agree the school district’s report clears the wrestling program of wrongdoing, both declined to share a copy of their report with the Monitor.
Collins said it would be up to the school district to share the report. Metzler said the district will not release it because it contains “student names and information that would be considered private.”
“It is not subject to public disclosure,” he said.
Metzler took issue with the information contained in Decker and Eddy’s report. He says the information, including personal addresses, violates the law under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which protects the privacy of student records.
Decker argues in the presentation that all the information in the report was compiled from public records, like voting information of students’ parents, and does not violate Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
Rich Durkin coached high school wrestling for some 17 years in Haverhill, Mass., about a 20-minute drive from his home in Atkinson. He also coached for several years at the youth level with his sons, who went on to have successful high school careers on the mat.
One of his sons was a starter at 113 pounds as a freshman at Timberlane about seven years ago but lost his spot a couple of years later.
The wrestler who replaced him is one of the athletes named in Decker and Eddy’s report as having been a resident of Maine while wrestling for the Owls. It further alleges the wrestler’s father rented a one-bedroom apartment in Atkinson only for the four years his son attended Timberlane.
But this is not news to Durkin.
“This has been going on for years,” he told the Monitor. “It’s been known, it’s just never been exposed. Nobody has taken it to the point these coaches have,” referring to Decker and Eddy’s investigation.
As a parent, coach and a former wrestler himself, Durkin described the community that surrounds wrestling: seeing the same parents at every tournament, watching other kids and his own grow up as they compete with and against each other.
Being so heavily involved in that world, Durkin knew of the best wrestlers in the New England region and the pattern was becoming more clear year by year as athletes continued to transfer into the Timberlane district.
“Not taking anything away from Barry, he’s a great guy and a great coach,” Durkin said. “But what’s fair is fair.”
It became more personal when it affected his son, who was second in the state as a freshman. Durkin had had enough, and the family decided to move to Massachusetts.
“We still had another son in eighth grade about to go in, so it made sense for us to say, ‘We’re not going to be a part of this,’ ” he said. “It’s too bad for the kids that did that. It’s more upsetting to the kids that actually lost positions due to a kid who moved in.”
Before his son wrestled for Concord High, Jim Mackenzie was a wrestling coach at Manchester’s YMCA. He was also an officer for New Hampshire Fish and Game.
When Mackenzie got a look at the report Decker and Eddy put together, one name jumped out at him because he remembered the chatter around the wrestler’s recruitment from his hometown in Maine to Timberlane.
“It was common knowledge,” Mackenzie said. “I knew he was a great wrestler and already at the top of his game, so everyone was talking about him.”
Concord wrestling coach Ham Munnell declined to comment for this story.
Multiple parents and coaches outside of Timberlane who spoke with the Monitor said the accusations are common knowledge, many people believe them to be true, but no one has been willing to do a thorough investigation, whether that’s the NHIAA, private citizens or the press.
Mackenzie said that ends now.
“All the things we’ve suspected are true,” he said. “You didn’t want to believe it because you thought there would be a ruling entity that would never let this happen. No checks and balances here.
“You can’t be putting out championships like that on your own talent. No one is that good.”
The Monitor obtained a copy of the report but did not publish it because it contained student names and addresses.
(Nick Stoico can be reached at 369-3321, nstoico@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @NickStoico.)