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GREENSBORO — New Bern High School's Ryan Freeman will replace Stan Kowalewski as boys basketball coach at Northern Guilford, sources have told the News & Record.

Northern Guilford athletics director Ronnie Hayes offered the job to Freeman this week while Freeman was in town attending the North Carolina Coaches Association clinic, sources said.

Freeman has accepted the job, but the deal is not done yet: Guilford County's school board must confirm his hiring at its Aug. 11 meeting.

Hayes confirmed Friday afternoon that he has extended a coaching offer and that the candidate has accepted. Hayes would not name the candidate.

Reached in New Bern on Friday, Freeman declined to comment.

Freeman's hiring ends a nine-week search for one of the most famous — and controversial — programs in the state. The Nighthawks won the state 3-A title this year without a single senior on their roster — a first in North Carolina. Six weeks later, the N.C. High School Athletic Association stripped the school of its title after two players were ruled ineligible.

The News & Record is not naming the students because they are minors and no laws were broken.

An investigation by Guilford County Schools determined that the students and their families falsified addresses and that Northern Guilford administrators should have detected the deception. The investigation cost Northern principal Joe Yeager and athletics director Derrell Force their jobs. Both were forced to resign, sources have said.

While the school system's investigation did not implicate Kowalewski, a non-faculty coach, his contract was not renewed.

Still, the Northern Guilford job is viewed as one of the best in the state — assuming the nucleus of the team returns. Many of the state's top 3-A basketball programs from the 2008-09 season — Dudley among them — will compete as 4-A programs starting this school year. Northern Guilford, which is still relatively small, will remain a 3-A program.

Hayes said dozens of coaches from across the state applied for the job before he even showed up for work at Northern last month.

"There was a lot of interest in this job, obviously," Hayes said. "It was an intensive search. I pulled the top six or seven candidates and came up with this young man. We think he's going to be exceptional."

Hayes said the new coach will be a full-time faculty member, a nod to a new policy approved Thursday night by school board members that urges schools to hire faculty members whenever possible. Freeman graduated from Elon University in 2000 with a degree in physical education. He earned his masters in P.E. at UNC-Pembroke while serving as a graduate assistant coach.

Freeman comes to Northern Guilford after two years as head coach at New Bern, a school that has excelled at football through the years but struggled in basketball. The Bears finished 28-21 in those two seasons, losing in the first round of the 4-A playoffs each year.

Before coaching at New Bern, Freeman was associate head coach at Old Saybrook (Conn.) High School and was an assistant coach at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Va.

Meanwhile, Hayes said he would not comment on a report by the News & Record that Guilford County Schools has ruled that at least three more students — two 2008 junior varsity football players and a student who transferred to Northern in the middle of the year to play football for the Nighthawks this fall — would be ruled ineligible to compete for Northern because of eligibility issues.

"Really, that's something I don't know a lot about because, being so new here, (the investigation) was going on before I showed up," Hayes said.

Contact Robert Bell at 373-7055 or robert.bell@news-record.com