Months after a report surfaced accusing the Timberlane High School wrestling program of violating eligibility rules, the state’s governing body of high school athletics says it will not revisit the allegations and is moving on.
The report in question was created via PowerPoint by two Salem High School wrestling coaches with careers in law enforcement. Using public information, such as voting and property records, the two coaches identify six former and current Timberlane wrestlers and present evidence that the athletes were living outside of the school district, which would be a violation of participation rules laid out by the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association.
NHIAA Executive Director Jeff Collins called on the Timberlane School District to look into the allegations against its program. The school turned around its own report and was cleared by the NHIAA and its eligibility committee, which is comprised of a group of athletic directors, principals and superintendents from various corners of the state.
“(Timberlane has) addressed the concerns brought up through the PowerPoint, and we’re moving forward with the rest of the season,” Collins said two weeks after the Monitorreported on the allegations.
Officials at Timberlane and the NHIAA refused to share a copy of the school’s report on the eligibility of the wrestlers, citing private information.
Wes Decker, one of the two Salem coaches who developed the PowerPoint, said he doesn’t see the issue going anywhere, for now.
“While we find the NHIAA’s decision to allow Timberlane to investigate and subsequently clear itself laughable, we accept it,” he said. “There’s no appeal process.”
While Decker and his co-head coach, Nick Eddy, dug into the allegations surrounding Timberlane’s program, Decker looked closely at a similar situation that occurred at Pembroke Academy in 2014.
The NHIAA, then under the leadership of former executive director Pat Corbin, was taking a close look at the Spartans’ powerhouse boys’ basketball team, which was accused of using a local AAU team as a feeder system while it drew athletes from across the state. Corbin denied the eligibility of two Pembroke players in that case; one had played for Merrimack Valley the previous season and the other for Londonderry.
Corbin’s decision to declare the two players ineligible put the onus on Pembroke officials to investigate the allegations themselves. Like Timberlane, Pembroke came out with its own report concluding the students’ residencies and reasons for transferring followed the rules. Neither athlete played that season, but both continued as Pembroke students.
Collins, the current head of the NHIAA who replaced Corbin in July 2014, said he was not familiar enough with the Pembroke case to draw comparisons. In the Timberlane case, Collins was not as quick to make a decision because he wanted to see more information. He found the accusations compelling enough to pursue further fact-finding and have the eligibility committee weigh in.
As for a potential conflict of interest in having a school investigate itself, as Pembroke did and Timberlane has, Collins said it can be tricky with a “self-reporting” organization like the NHIAA.
“Part of (a school’s) membership is to look into issues if they arise, if they occur, and to be straightforward and honest with us about what’s going on,” he said. “A conflict of interest, that’s difficult to assess when it is a membership-driven organization.”
More than anything, the two Salem coaches said they want to see Timberlane’s report that took the program off the hook.
“We just want to see the info that refutes ours,” Decker said.
(Nick Stoico can be reached at 369-3321, nstoico@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @NickStoico.)