The girls basketball head coach job at Stuarts Draft High School quietly came open after an Augusta Free Press report in February drew public attention to head coach James Carter’s prominent antigovernment militia tattoo.
Carter, SDHS principal Nick Nycum, the high school’s athletics director, Jeremiah Major, and Augusta County schools superintendent Eric Bond all declined to comment for the Feb. 22 AFP report, which detailed how a parent had brought the tattoo, a large Three Percenters logo on Carter’s right forearm, to the attention of school system officials.
That the girls basketball coach position had become open since the AFP report two months only became public knowledge today with a report in the News Leader that the school has hired a new head coach, Chad Seibert, a former assistant coach at Bridgewater College and Mary Baldwin University.
“All the ingredients you need for success from a community, from an administration, was there,” Seibert told the News Leader. “The JV team was very successful last year. There’s some good young talent coming up. They’re going to have a group of seniors next year that’s going to give us a chance to be competitive right away. I felt like it just checked so many boxes for us that it was kind of a no-brainer.”
Seibert, according to the News Leader report, was introduced to the team as the new head coach last week.
The Stuarts Draft girls basketball team finished the 2022-2023 season with a 4-18 record. In the three seasons since Carter returned as the head coach for the program in 2020, his teams played to a 10-38 overall record.
In his first five-year stint as the head coach at Stuarts Draft, Carter’s teams compiled a 60-43 record, including a 22-7 mark in the 2016-2017 season, in which the Cougars earned a state tournament berth.
The tattoo first came to the attention of parents in the Stuarts Draft community who reached out to us about Carter, who is also a special education teacher at SDHS, in a Jan. 24 photo of Carter posted to the Stuarts Draft High School Facebook page.
The Three Percenters group that the tattoo on Carter’s forearm pays homage to is a loosely affiliated militia group that advocates armed resistance to the federal government.
Members of Three Percenters groups have been involved in multiple threats aimed at federal authorities, state legislators and the plot to kidnap and kill Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
The only person affiliated with Augusta County Public Schools who commented on the issue with Carter for our report in February was Nick Collins, the chairman of the Augusta County School Board, who told AFP that he had not been aware of any situation that had existed with Carter until we reached out to about the concerns of parents over the tattoo.
“A lot of our employees have tattoos of one sort or another, and we’ve had to address issues with a number of things that have come up over the years with items that teachers have in their classrooms. For the time being, I want to see where this thing is going to go before I say much more about this,” Collins said.
On a personal level, Collins noted that he has known Carter, a Buffalo Gap High School graduate and Staunton native, “for a long time, since the early 2000s when he was coaching at Buffalo Gap High School, and I think he’s done a great job,” Collins said.
Share
Chris Graham
