The Union High School football team won its regional semifinal game Saturday over Graham High School, 12-0, to advance to a championship game this weekend with Ridgeview, which Union defeated by a 42-21 final score last month.
Union, which improved to 12-0 on the season with the dub, won as its coach, Travis Turner, a former Virginia Tech recruit, had gone missing two nights earlier, as police were on their way to his residence as part of the “early stages of an investigation.”
Nothing is known, officially, on the nature of the investigation; Wise County Schools said on Friday that it had placed a staff member on paid administrative leave “while an external agency reviews an allegation that was reported to the division.”
It was not reported that Turner, who has been the head coach at Union since 2011, was the staff member, but it seems clear that the two are connected.
In the absence of an official story as to what is going on, the rumor mill has run wild, both on the side of speculation on the nature of the “allegation,” and the coach’s safety and well-being.
All we know for sure, at this writing, three days later, is that Turner, 46, is still listed as missing on a Virginia State Police missing persons database.
Background
Turner was one of three QBs in the 1998 Virginia Tech recruiting class – along with Grant Noel, who would go on to be named the starter in 2001, and another guy named Michael Vick, who you also may have heard of.
Turner got himself out of the logjam by transferring out after a year, landing at UVA-Wise, where he was the starting QB in the 1999 season, passing for 1,553 yards and 10 TDs, before transferring again, to Eastern Kentucky, then a I-AA powerhouse, under legendary coach Roy Kidd, who won 314 games and two I-AA national titles at the school.
Turner started several games at EKU in 2001 and 2002, almost outdueling the QB at Eastern Illinois, a fella named Tony Romo, in a 25-24 loss in 2002, in which Romo scrambled eight yards for the game-winning TD in the final seconds.
Turner’s father, Tom Turner, was a defensive lineman at Virginia Tech from 1972-1976, and as the head coach at Appalachia High School, he led the football program to 205 wins and five state titles, three of those with Travis as the starting QB.
Tom Turner died in 2006 at the age of 54, just months after retiring from education and high-school coaching.
Union High School is the successor school of Appalachia and Powell Valley, the alma mater of UVA Football legend Thomas Jones.
The two schools combined for 13 state football titles before the 2011 merger.
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Chris Graham
