WIAA Rescinds Fines Levied Against Roosevelt Coaches and AD After Appeal
Adults responsible for the massive scandal acknowledged the findings and didn't contest penalties against school, students. They didn't want their wallets or reputations further harmed. WIAA agreed.
RENTON — Yesterday, news broke that the coaches and administrators responsible for the Roosevelt recruiting scandal successfully appealed the fines and personal penalties that stood to impact their pocketbooks and reputations.
This despite the fact that the findings of wrongdoing levied against the adults in question remain unchallenged.
According to a Varsity WA report (the appeal wasn’t public and no public notes or minutes have been released), the WIAA Executive Board voted in favor of rescinding the $2,500 fines levied against former Roosevelt coaches Sam Adams, Saul Patu and Dom Skene; as well as the fine levied against Danny Thompson.
Thompson is the Roosevelt AD who brushed off a complaint by the Bethel Athletic Director in early 2024, asking Thompson to stop Roosevelt staff from calling Bethel students during the school day and offering them scholarships and illegal benefits to transfer to Roosevelt. Included in the communication to Thompson was a list of specific complaints and evidence compiled and forwarded by multiple area coaches. From a KUOW report:
In spring 2024, Tyson Lowry, the athletic director at Bethel School District, sent Thompson, Roosevelt’s athletic director, a list of reports from coaches in his district citing evidence of recruiting. Roosevelt football staff were allegedly luring Bethel players and parents with the promise of college athletic scholarships, “telling players and parents they should have multiple offers right now and if they come to Roosevelt they will get those offers,” Lowry said.
Roosevelt football staff reportedly called students during school hours to entice them to transfer to the school, Lowry told Thompson, “telling kids to claim homeless and they will be fine.”
Thompson denied the accusations in his email response. “It is very disappointing to be accused of illegal recruiting when Roosevelt can only service students who are placed through the enrollment process of Seattle Public Schools,” Thompson wrote. “I would like this email to serve as Roosevelt High School’s first attempt to ask you to politely stop spreading false rumors about Roosevelt High School and our Sports Programs.”
All of the listed violations turned out to be…well, violations. Roosevelt was found to have improperly recruited four Bethel athletes. But Thompson ignored the attempts of his colleague to motivate self-correction.
Instead Thompson continued to deflect, deny and make counter-accusation to any and all who questioned the system of improperly recruiting athletes from outside schools, tempting them with promises of impermissible benefits that wouldn’t be delivered, and then promptly teaching the kids to lie on their registration forms, falsely claiming homelessness, in order to get around state eligibility requirements.
You don’t have to take my word for it. These are the findings of the WIAA investigation, and Seattle Schools acknowledges the findings. It’s just the fines against the adults they wanted removed.
The abdication of responsibility and the arrogance of the adults involved would be laughable if it wasn’t so sickening.
Consider the testimony of Seattle Schools Athletic Director Pat McCarthy, whose lawyer appealed McCarthy’s $3500 fine on the basis that McCarthy was “barely mentioned” in the report. Maybe if he’d been more visible, less violations would’ve occurred. Probably not.
McCarthy even admitted that he and Seattle Schools agreed with the findings of the WIAA investigation, stating that
“Seattle Public Schools accepts the fact-finder’s report, accepts the responsibility for the violations and is not contesting the institutional penalties, forfeitures, probations or the suspension from postseason.”
And yet, according to published reports,
Hit the jump for a copy of the WIAA Fact Finder Report and a breakdown of the findings against Roosevelt and the related reactions of the district, school and individual leaders.
the WIAA board struck down the fines levied against the Roosevelt athletic director and football coaches responsible for the recruiting scandal that resulted in the removal of principal Jan Brewer and the forfeiture of two seasons worth of football games.
According to a VarsityWA report (no public minutes have been released),
Danny Thompson and football coaches Sam Adams, Saul Patu and Dom Skene successfully appealed the $3,500 fines they’d received for Level 3 violations of the WIAA Handbook. We can only assume that Seattle Schools AD Pat McCarthy will get away with his “I’m barely mentioned defense” and insure that all of the adults escape punishment, while all of the penalties against students are upheld.
Why do these people have jobs again? Maybe more people need to read the report. Here it is.
Revisiting the Roosevelt Scandal
J425 broke the story of how Adams and Tracy Ford contacted dozens of athletes around the I-5 corridor and tempted them into transferring to Roosevelt ahead of the 2024 season, offering promises of financial benefits, 7v7 positions, expense reimbursements and college scholarships. At least 18 area players transferred.
Upon arriving at Roosevelt, Adams and company instructed the players on how to fraudulently fill out registration paperwork, falsely identifying themselves as homeless students in order to get around state eligibility, grade check and attendance requirements tied to athletic participation.
All 18 players who identified themselves as homeless were granted immediate eligibility after a review by Roosevelt Athletic Director Danny Thompson granted them “provisional” homeless status.
If they hadn’t lied, the players would’ve been ineligible for a number of reasons, but mainly because one must live within the school district to play at that school; and because transfer students that arrive for athletically-motivated reasons were required to sit out a season at the time of the Roosevelt incident.
A 47-page investigative report compiled by a Vancouver-based education lawyer demonstrated how Roosevelt’s football staff cynically abused a Federal program designed to assist legitimately homeless students in order to fufill selfish competitive goals, if not to increase their personal visibility and that of the 7v7 trainer assisting the effort: Tracy Ford of Ford Sports Performance.
Ford was mentioned 27 times in the previous biggest recruiting scandal in state history and had his own section in the Roosevelt investigatory report.
Sam Adams was an FSP employee prior to taking the Roosevelt job, and the investigatory report reveals that Adams was approaching players at FSP and working closely with Ford throughout the period under investigation. So close was their affiliation, the report states on multiple occasions that Roosevelt parents upset with Adams’ treatment of their players brought their complaints to Tracy Ford. Ford is not an employee of Seattle Schools or affiliated with Roosevelt High School.
The fact that the WIAA dropped the fines levied against these actors is hard to believe in light of the comprehensive nature in which these leaders flaunted the system, the blatant dishonesty they displayed during the period in question (they repeatedly lied on the record and if they’ve apologized or explained themselves for their actions, it hasnt occurred in public) and the aggressive and disrespectful manner in which those who attempted to address the improper behaviors of Adams and company were treated.
The fact that the financial penalties for the adults were rescinded while the penalties against the student athletes werent considered is a perfect representation of the motivations of those involved.
Assistant Coach Saul Patu monetized the scandal to the tune of $80,000 a year in sole-source cash disbursals. What was the service provided? Patu transformed a public classroom into a private social club solely for the football players. Staff and students who questioned this use of resources were ignored, lied to or told to shut up. The poor woman responsible for verifying the homeless status of new students was badgered into another building by Patu, Adams and Thompson. From the fact finder report, which Seattle Schools acknowledged in full:
And inside this club, which Patu aptly called “The Kennel”, the 18 “black and brown boys” (Principal Brewer told the WIAA investigator it was her mission to save “black and brown boys”) illegally recruited by Roosevelt wasted away during the 2024 football season.
You see, as a result of the homeless status they were provisionally granted as a result of Adams and Patu’s cynical abuse of the Federal homeless program, these students were not subject to normal athletic and student standards: they were not required to attend school and their grades were not subject to review during the season. As a result, players were housed in the private “kennel”, apart from the student body, and then let out to go chase the football when Adams and Patu were ready.
According to documents obtained by the WIAA investigator, the amount of absenteeism was staggering. One player had over 45 absences and 67 tardies in just one semester. Further, investigators looked into the travel habits of the improperly recruited athletes. Homeless kids are given access to special transportation assistance to make sure they can get to and from school. So were these kids receiving transfer assistance?
No, they were not. And on one hand that’s a good thing, because all but one of the 18 were found to be ineligible for the homeless benefits, but on the other hand its revealing because the investigator found that the students in question hadnt even moved at all. Four Bethel athletes didn’t really move from Bethel to Roosevelt. They just stopped going to classes at Bethel and started driving to Roosevelt to hang out in the Kennel and play football.
The violations – required to be self reported by Roosevelt AD Danny Thompson and/or his boss Pat McCarthy – were apparent long before the 2024 season. By the Spring of 2024, area athletic directors were so sick of the behavior of Roosevelt football staff that the Bethel athletic director took the extraordinary step of compiling a list of evidence and complaints of recruiting from a series of SPSL and Metro coaches, putting it into writing, sending it to Roosevelt AD Danny Thompson and demanding that Roosevelt stop calling Bethel students during the day and offering them scholarships to transfer to Roosevelt.
Thompson rudely shrugged off the contact from the Bethel AD and continued to support Roosevelt recruiting that poached at least four players from Bethel.
“It is very disappointing to be accused of illegal recruiting when Roosevelt can only service students who are placed through the enrollment process of Seattle Public Schools,” Thompson wrote to his colleague Tyson Lowry, whose complaints turned out to be well-founded. “I would like this email to serve as Roosevelt High School’s first attempt to ask you to politely stop spreading false rumors about Roosevelt High School and our Sports Programs.”
By the time Roosevelt’s season hit midway (8-4, hope it was worth it), news of the scandal had broken.
The anonymous surveys of 50+ Washington high school coaches bitching about Roosevelt’s behavior had turned into specific, published accounts of Roosevelt staff contacting students on social media or via phone, in clear violation of WIAA standards.
As each new report was published, the lies of the Roosevelt figures compounded.
In October, Principal Tami Brewer wrote an all-staff email filled with verifiable lie upon verifiable lie – she claimed that no recruiting occurred and that she’d led a review into the allegations and cleared Roosevelt, statements so obviously untrue that J425 published multiple instances of Roosevelt staff directly contacting student athletes and attempting to recruit them to Roosevelt the next day. Brewer did not respond.
Meanwhile, also in Seattle Schools
Also in October, a related scandal was overtaking a neighboring Seattle high school.
Over at Garfield, Assistant Coach Saul Patu’s sister was arrested by Federal agents just one day after The Stranger reported that Seattle Schools was paying her almost $200K per year as a substitute for the duly sworn Seattle Police officers they’d removed from campus as part of the defund the police movement following 2020. The job Seattle Schools tasked her with: promoting non-violence and protecting students.
The charges federal agents arrested her and five other family members she lived with on: running a multistate fentanyl ring recently responsible for the death of four Lummi nation members. Patu’s sister was charged with laundering drug money through her non-violence charity and Patu’s nephew was charged with running the multi-state ring. From the KUOW report:
Saul Patu, the defensive coordinator for the Roughriders and a onetime candidate for Seattle City Council, is the son of longtime former Seattle School Board Member Betty Patu. The (Roosevelt recruiting scandal) was the second recent school district scandal for their family; the school district cut ties last year with the violence prevention program his sister Marty Jackson ran in several Seattle schools after she and several family members were indicted on federal drug trafficking charges.
So in summary, everything is upside down in Seattle. Adults lie to students and promise impermissible benefits that they don’t actually deliver on (none of the 18 received college scholarships), the students absorb the losses and the penalties after being tricked into non-sensical mid-year moves to a program controlled by their 7v7 coaches.
The adults reap the benefits: $80,000 annual cash disbursals for the wonderful service of taking a public resource and turning it into a Kennel for housing athletes while other kids go to school. And in case you think this corruption is a one off, the sister of the guy running the Kennel scam is getting $200k per year as a sick substitute for police – tasked with protecting Garfield students – all the while she uses this same non profit to launder the drug proceeds of the multistate lethal fentanyl ring she’s currently awaiting trial for.
When the results of the investigation were made public last June, Seattle Schools quickly placed Roosevelt principal Tami Brewer on leave. Adams, Patu and company completely avoided any public explanation of their actions, they just disappeared. Athletic directors Thompson and McCarthy deflected, denied and made counter accusations.
In fact, the first time any of these adult leaders surfaced at all was in an attempt to make sure they wouldn’t have to pay the paltry $3500 fines levied against them for their Level 3 WIAA violations.
Those involved had been completely absent during the investigation. Despite agreeing to the scope and powers of the investigator prior to the fact-finding mission, those responsible for the rule breaking made themselves scarce when explanations and responsibility came due. In fact, McCarthy and Thompson stonewalled the investigation for months on end, refusing to turn over the key required documents and allowing personnel to delay or avoid interviews for almost five months. Ultimately, the investigator was forced to complete her report without the requested materials and without the assistance promised by Seattle. Still, she found more than enough evidence to justify the Level 3 penalties against the major players involved, writing
“Roosevelt administrators and coaches are responsible for preventing violations, adhering to processes, and intervening to ensure compliance with WAA rules. If violations occur, their roles require action to stop violations from continuing. Roosevelt did not acknowledge violation of rules in response to multiple allegations of inappropriate recruiting of football players that occurred prior to initiation of this fact-finding. At no point in the fact-finding did anyone from Roosevelt or Seattle acknowledge a violation of WAA rules or Seattle’s policies and procedure.”