Track Scars

With the new school year starting up, the Strip is feeling nostalgic. Not for its own days in the hallowed halls of education, but for the juicy school scandal that gripped this metro just two years ago.

It was back in 2003 that we all learned how a couple of Independence cross-country coaches had turned out to be scheming frauds.

For a short time, the dastardly coaching duo, Tom Billington and Chris Earley, became big news -- even making the pages of USA Today and The Washington Post.

Their crime? After taking their Truman High School teams on a five-day trip to California in September 2003, they returned claiming to have run a big race against La Jolla High School (Billington's boys won, Earley's girls lost). But soon, it seemed that the "meet" was little more than a frolic on the beach. Exposed as liars, the coaches were suspended after the Independence School District found that the coaches had also done hinky things with public money (though none was missing).

Billington and Earley lost their coaching jobs but worked out a settlement allowing them to keep their teaching jobs, as well as their seniority and future retirement benefits.

It was a pretty sweet deal, considering what nefarious rascals these guys were. In fact, even after two years, something about the Billington-Earley affair still didn't smell right, and the Strip began to sniff around.

And before long, we found the origin of that stench in the rotten carcass of a long-forgotten newspaper story.

Turns out that a humble sports roundup item printed on September 24, 2003, in the Independence Examiner sparked the entire controversy.

"The Patriot boys defeated La Jolla 23-32, while the Patriot girls dropped a 23-37 decision in the dual meet held on a 3.4-mile beach course at Balboa Park," the unsigned article announced, after quoting Billington as saying a fine time was had by all.

But the event had actually been little more than a practice. The run hadn't even been held at Balboa Park, and the runners' parents knew it.

Believing that Billington was lying to the Examiner, parents complained to the school's administration. Other news organizations piled on, believing that Billington had returned from California telling the Examiner that the teams had competed in a formal meet, when that wasn't true at all.

Meanwhile, school administrators told Billington and Earley to keep their mouths shut, so they refused to talk with the press.

Nearly two weeks later, on October 7, when the Examiner reported that the coaches had been fired because of the La Jolla trip, a story included this quote from an unnamed parent: "What I do have a problem with was reading in the paper that the team had won and that there were times and places of the order of finish, and some of the cross-country runners had already told friends and relatives that they didn't run a meet."

What that October 7 article didn't say was that this unhappy, unnamed parent was Ron Bruch, stepfather to one of the runners. Bruch was something else as well: assistant to the school district's superintendent.

Billington's alleged lies to the Examiner, in other words, had pissed off powerful people.

"It appeared that the [September 24] story may have played a part in the firings," wrote Examiner sports editor Karl Zinke on October 7.

But Zinke also wrote that the story's unnamed writer had done something unethical. A quote ascribed to Earley, the correction claimed, had allegedly come from Billington, and the mysterious, unidentified Examiner reporter had not bothered to check it with Earley himself. For that, the paper had suspended the writer.

As for the rest of the nameless writer's story? The scores? The times? Even those, Zinke acknowledged, had been "brought into question." But Zinke reassured his readers: "We believed the results were true at the time they were reported."

Over the past several weeks, however, your proteinacious narrator went back over the matter. Billington and Earley, silent for so long, are finally telling their sides of the story. And the Strip also spoke to runners and their parents, who were largely ignored when the controversy first raged. And most importantly, we tracked down the mysterious Examiner writer.

So sit back, relax, and let this chuck steak start from the beginning.

Before Tom Billington was labeled a conniving liar and an embarrassment to the Independence School District, he was considered one of the finest cross-country and track coaches in the metro. Billington had started coaching at Truman in 1981, and later helped found a metro coaches association to help push the sport. Other coaches looked up to him not only because he turned out winning teams year after year, but also because he promoted the sport so doggedly. For years, an event that Billington developed and hosted -- the Truman Invitational -- was the biggest early-season meet on the high school track calendar.

Billington pushed players. He pushed other coaches. He pushed reporters. And in recent years, Billington had found himself pushing against an immovable object: the notoriously stubborn Missouri State High School Activities Association.

The Pitch has written about MSHSAA's obstinance before. In 2003, then-staff writer Joe Miller produced an acclaimed series about how Central High School's remarkable debate team -- so talented, it was being invited to prestigious competitions around the country -- was being hurt by the myopic bureaucrats at MSHSAA, whose rules wouldn't allow inner-city Central to travel long distances, even though it meant missing out on amazing educational experiences.