news-record.com

Northern head coach Stan Kowalewski obviously had some strong feelings about today's story. Here are excerpts of what he said to me this afternoon:

"We don't make the rules. Guilford County and the NCHSAA make the rules, and we abide by them. And until Guilford County changes their rules, then parents are going to, within those rules, do what they want to do. If they end up at our school, they end up at our school. Or they end up at another school. The rules are what they are. We make sure we follow them to a T, our athletic department as well as our administration. All we can do is follow them, we can't make them.

It's very disappointing to me that although the News & Record says that there's a lot of e-mails from coaches or fans, that nobody is willing to be non-anonymous, that nobody's willing to bring forth concrete evidence that we're doing things wrong. Everyone wants to hide behind anonymity. That's disappointing because I think it's cowardice. It's very difficult for us as a school to defend ourselves when we don't know who our accusers are. ...

Whoever these coaches are, it's just jealousy, that's all it is. Until they can step up and first of all be a man and make a comment to a newspaper on the record, when they can do that, then I think somebody would listen to them. If I want to hide behind "I don't want to be revealed as a source," then it is what it is. ...

People thought we were doing something wrong before reading the article and people thought we weren't. I don't think the article changes their opinion of it.

I did believe there's no information in this article that couldn't have been written two, three, six months ago. The timing of bringing it out on the eve of the state championship, I wasn't impressed with.

When you work so hard as a coaching staff and your kids work so hard as players to get better, and this article is brought up instead of, ‘Hey, maybe Northern Guilford's coaches really know what they're doing. Maybe they work harder than everybody else around here. Maybe their kids work harder and they deserve the accolades they're getting when they get this far.' Nobody wants to give us any credit, they just find ways to discredit us.

Our coaching staff, we don't have any egos. We don't care. But the kids deserve better than that."