Mathieu Leaves AD Post at DCPS

He Held Job for Less Than 10 Months

Troy Mathieu announced he will step down as athletic director of D.C. Public Schools at the end of next week after less than 10 months on the job.

Mathieu said he has agreed to take over as athletic director of the Grand Prairie (Tex.) Independent School District, a 26,000-student system in suburban Dallas. When Mathieu took the DCPS job last summer, he moved here with his son, while his wife and daughter remained in Texas for this school year.

"It's a good opportunity, not only from a professional standpoint, but also personally," Mathieu said. "I had to weigh a ton of factors."

Mathieu's hiring last summer was heralded by many involved in D.C. scholastic athletics as a break from the past, as he was the first athletic director hired from outside the Washington area in more than three decades. Prior to his arrival in the District, Mathieu was athletic director at Grambling State University, following a nine-year stint supervising athletics in the Dallas Independent School District, which has three times as many students as DCPS.

"I liked him a lot," Theodore Roosevelt Athletic Director Daryl Tilghman said. "He had a vision and he was trying to get things in place. But it seemed like he was hamstrung from doing the things he wanted to do."

Mathieu's replacement will inherit an intimidating set of tasks that have long plagued DCPS athletics. The athletic office employs five full-time staffers to oversee the operations of interscholastic sports in grades 4-12 at more than 140 schools citywide.

"The level of dysfunction is so mountainous," said one DCPS athletic director, "there's no way Troy could've cleaned it up."

At the same time, DCPS is struggling to reconcile the growing enrollment of students in charter schools. Those schools' athletic programs have limited leadership and organization that are not overseen by DCPS. They could, however, have more students than DCPS by 2014, if current enrollment trends continue.

Over the past three years, though, DCPS has increased the athletic department's budget by more than 65 percent. In addition, with the creation of the DCPS Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization, 10 high schools have new athletic fields with FieldTurf surfaces and new tracks surrounding the fields.

A source who has worked closely with Mathieu said it became difficult for him to enact change, due to the structure of the DCPS administration.

"He has so many people over him that it's impossible to do anything," the source said. "The problem with this job is, nobody is going to allow you to make any major moves because they just want to save their job."

Mathieu had also worked with officials to try to form a partnership between D.C. public and private schools. He was involved in discussions to replicate last's year's inaugural Congressional Bank D.C. Baseball Classic for other sports across the city. The first Softball Classic was held last weekend.