When Northern Guilford had an opening for an athletics director in 2010, three candidates were in the running when the hiring committee asked each of them about cutting grass.
One said he would hire someone to do it and the second said he had never done it before. The third was Brian Thomas, who not only did field maintenance willingly but built an athletic program with nine state championships across five different sports in 13 years.
It was announced Monday that Thomas will be stepping down from his position and that current assistant athletics director Chase Cochran will assume the role, effective Aug. 1.
“This is a decision that I have made for my health,” Thomas said. “I had an injury a couple years ago, which a lot of people know about, and then a year-and-a-half later, I had some secondary health concerns from the injury, had some hospital stays and surgery from it. The surgery that I had seems to be helping out, so I’m not having the issues that I was having.”
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“But the responsibility of an athletics director in my opinion is ‘You’re here, you’re here for games, somebody is here for games’ and so putting in a 12, 15 hour day into the evening is not something that I feel is going to be beneficial for my health and I have the years in (for benefits) to where I can retire.”
During his tenure, Thomas blended enforcing the rules with trusting his coaches. Behind the scenes, Thomas took care of fields, painted the lines and promoted equality by creating fair budget numbers for girls and boys sports.
For a school established in 2007, Title IX research influenced decisions on upgrading facilities. The baseball team had dugouts, but the softball team didn’t, so a softball project was done to establish equality. Other notable facility enhancements include concessions for the baseball-softball complex and a new gymnasium floor.
Kim Furlough was the school’s girls basketball coach from inception until retirement after the 2023 season. She said Thomas had a strong relationship with the booster club and ensured fair fundraising between girls and boys teams. He was known to make an effort to attend Nighthawks games, but stayed away from coaches’ decisions involving management and playing time. He made it mandatory for coaches to meet with players who requested them, but was against parents having in-season meetings with coaches for issues like playing time.
“The parental piece on that is that if a parent wants to meet with a coach prior to the season or after the season, they will meet with them, but during the season, that is the coaching staff and the coach’s time to develop their kids and we want to stay away from as many distractions as we possibly can,” Thomas said.
Eligibility was a point of emphasis, so much so that he did home visits to make sure that students lived in Northern’s attendance zone and weren’t participating illegally in the program.
Starting with the 2010-11 school year, the first state titles came in football, which went on to win four NCHSAA 3-AA championships in a five-year span. The program won three in a row and had a 29-game winning streak under Johnny Roscoe, before he retired for a year, came back and won another one in 2014.
Cochran has been the assistant athletics director since Furlough’s retirement. The new athletics director has been an assistant football coach. Per Guilford County policy, an athletics director is not permitted to coach, so Cochran will have to give up his coaching duties in exchange for the new position.
“He has been on the football coaching staff, so he has a good relationship with coach Thomas and they have worked really well together, so he is going to do an outstanding job,” Furlough said. “He is very organized and he is very thorough. I think you will see a lot of the same kind of support and thoroughness that you saw from coach Thomas.”