DeMatha-Good Counsel football rivalry intensified by private coaching

When Zach Dancel, a promising quarterback, was preparing to start his high school career a few years ago, his father wanted to give him every possible advantage. Bernie Dancel arranged for Zach to receive individual instruction and offseason training.

The best choice for a tutor, though, turned out to be a coach who ran the offense at a rival school. Even though Zach would soon be enrolling at Good Counsel, the Dancels thought the best private instructor was DeMatha offensive coordinator Chris Baucia, who has a blossoming business called the Quarterback Factory, training many of the region's top high school players.

Baucia worked with Dancel for three years during the offseason, and the passer's skills improved to the point that he became the Good Counsel starter entering last season, his junior year. With Good Counsel and DeMatha fighting it out as the top two teams in the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference, the passions surrounding the teams' games last fall -- once during the regular season and again during the WCAC title game -- ran deep.

While DeMatha Coach Bill McGregor and Good Counsel Coach Bob Milloy played down the situation, Baucia's relationship with Dancel created angst on both sidelines. The DeMatha coaching staff wondered how much one of their peers had helped an opponent. Their counterparts at Good Counsel worried that DeMatha might have inside information about one of the Falcons' most important players.

Among those who were concerned was Zach's father, who also happens to be Good Counsel's running backs coach. "Our coaching staff worried about it, and I had concerns that [Baucia] was going to know some of [Zach's] weaknesses," Bernie Dancel said.

Whether those concerns were justified -- and how much Baucia was personally responsible for Zach Dancel's development -- is difficult to measure. But after Dancel passed for 186 yards and one touchdown in Good Counsel's 14-7 victory in the WCAC championship game -- a win that ended a five-year title-game losing streak to the Stags and propelled Good Counsel to The Washington Post's No. 1 ranking at season's end -- things reached a boiling point at DeMatha.

DeMatha's offensive line coach, Tim Breslin, quit -- and the school's principal, Dan McMahon, acknowledged it was at least in part because of Baucia's tutoring of Dancel. Attempts to reach Breslin for comment were unsuccessful.

"It was a huge stink," one person familiar with the situation said on the condition of anonymity because the topic created such tension at the Hyattsville school. "How that happened, it was beyond a lot of people. There were a lot of questions, a lot of unhappy people. A lot of people, I guess the best word I can use, were extremely [ticked] off."

Baucia, a 1986 DeMatha graduate and former scholarship football player at Virginia Tech who has coached football and taught physical education and health for nearly two decades at his alma mater, declined to comment for this story.

He did make changes to the Quarterback Factory after the season.

A release form that players must fill out prior to attending the Quarterback Factory now stipulates, "No player may be accepted or attend this program if they attend a WCAC private school. DeMatha Catholic HS has deemed this a conflict of interest and will not allow Coach Baucia to train a player that attends a WCAC high school."

Although the situation created considerable concern among coaches and administrators at the two schools, the players said they saw nothing wrong with being coached by an opposing team coach.

Zach Dancel said he considered working with Baucia to be "more like a personal coach, than DeMatha's coach." Similarly, second-team All-Met Kevin Hogan of Gonzaga, who also was once trained by Baucia, said he did not see a problem with the arrangement. Gonzaga is also a longtime DeMatha rival.

"He was just helping a bunch of us out," Hogan said, noting that Baucia occasionally held workouts in the DeMatha gymnasium. "I didn't really think it was that big a deal."

According to coaches and players, the marketplace for personal football instruction is rapidly growing. At the same time, high school coaches -- who often are paid small stipends for their work -- have found a potentially lucrative way to supplement their income with position-specific training. The amount of available and qualified coaches, however, is small enough that conflict-of-interest concerns like what happened in the WCAC last season may be inevitable.

"In basketball, in addition to high school coaches, there are lots of people involved who can set themselves up [as private coaches], but in football you have a much more limited pool," McMahon said. "That, of course, leads to all sorts of interesting potential problems down the road. To what extent are you coaching and helping kids who you are competing against in your primary job? That's a problem."

Some coaches, such as Episcopal offensive coordinator Bryson Spinner, say they are not concerned about the potential conflicts of interest. Spinner, a former All-Met at the Alexandria school who played at Virginia, does quarterback training for Perfect Performance, which was founded four years ago by three former Howard University football players, including former NFL tight end Leonard Stephens.

Spinner said roughly half of his 20 current clients are in high school and that last year he worked with the quarterback at one other Interstate Athletic Conference school, Ryan Sehrer of Alexandria rival St. Stephen's/St. Agnes.

"It's not about the schools, it's about the kids," Spinner said. "Kids that come to our company, they're trying to get better. The kid's high school, the coach's high school, we leave that to the side. What high school they're playing for and we're coaching, it doesn't matter."

Because individual instruction during the offseason is a relatively new industry that has attracted mainly private school coaches, it has not received attention from state high school athletic regulating agencies.

"Obviously, it's not against our rules for kids to go out and get private coaches or private tutors," said Ned Sparks, executive director of the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association. "We haven't thought much about it. [It's] one of those things where the people involved don't give it much thought until it actually happens."

Since Baucia made the decision to turn away players from other WCAC schools, Hogan said he has not had enough time to find another teacher, though Gonzaga first-year coach Aaron Brady said he was looking to provide Hogan with more opportunities to improve.

"If your high school doesn't bring you an adequate answer, kids are going to do those things," Brady said.