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FAST lawsuit looms, coach resigns
As the winter swim season winds down, the legal action is heating up for the Fauquier Area Swim Team.
On Tuesday, FAST attorney Mike Sawyer confirmed that he's preparing a lawsuit against the Town of Warrenton for breach of contract.
On top of that, swim coach Jenny York has resigned from the team because she hasn't been paid since November.
Sawyer, a Leesburg attorney who is doing pro bono work for FAST, denied reports that the group is suing for $270,000.
“It's not finalized. I'm working on it now,” he said, explaining that he has not yet put a dollar figure to the lawsuit.
Tensions between the FAST board of directors and the Town of Warrenton have been growing for months. Things came to a head in November when FAST, which has been managing the Warrenton Aquatic Recreation Facility, ran out of money and was unable to pay its lifeguards and coaches.
The town stepped in, hiring all the lifeguards and taking over management of the facility.
At the same time, town officials offered FAST a new contract that stated the FAST swim team could maintain its home-team status at the WARF, but the FAST board could no longer manage the facility.
The FAST board refused to sign the new contract and threatened a lawsuit against the town.
That lawsuit is now in the works and Sawyer said Tuesday that it will be filed “pretty soon.”
“It's basically going to be a breach of contract (suit),” he said. “The issues haven't changed.”
For its part, Warrenton officials have maintained that it was the FAST board that broke the contract by failing to hold up its end of the deal.
The original contract had stated that FAST would give the town all profits from the WARF — estimated at $250,000 per year — but that the town would make up the difference if there were a shortfall.
None of that has happened. The FAST board hasn't turned a profit, and Warrenton hasn't made up the difference.
Who is to blame for the sagging revenue and who broke contract first are matters of heated debate that will likely be fought out in court.
In the meantime, FAST swimmers are about to find themselves without a coach.
Jenny York, the team coach, has been working for free since November when the money suddenly ran out. Last week, she told the team parents that she needed to leave in order to pursue full-time employment.
“It was not an easy decision to make, and I was by no means happy to do it,” she said Monday.
York and the other FAST staffers found out the day before Thanksgiving that they were being shorted for about 10 days pay because FAST had run out of money and the town was refusing to make up the difference.
The town immediately hired the lifeguards and put them back to work, paying them the back wages owed by FAST.
York was not hired, however, because her job was to coach the swim team and the town was taking over management of the pools, not of the swim team.
York had quit her teaching job in Fairfax to take the coach's job, which she held from August until the team's money ran out. With Christmas approaching, the money was gone, the kids were in the middle of swim season and York had been told that she would no longer be paid.
She stayed on anyway.
Just before Christmas, swim parents met her at the pool and handed over a check to help York's family make it through the holidays.
“It just shows that they're committed to this,” York said at the time, clutching what she later acknowledged was a check for more than $900.
Actually, several parents said, it just shows how good York is.
“Phenomenal,” said parent Tracy Ciuffo, describing her daughter's coach. Since York took over, children have seen their best times cut dramatically — in some cases, by dozens of seconds — Ciuffo said.
All that was months ago, though, and Warrenton and FAST still haven't worked out their differences.
And while York said she remains committed to her swimmers and their parents, she needs to move on once the season ends this weekend.
The celebrated swim coach has a part-time teaching job and also plans to work with York Swim Club, a family-owned group.
The club already operates out of Northern Virginia and York said her ultimate goal is to rent lane time from the WARF so the York team could swim there.
That, she said, is all anyone really wants — a chance to swim.
“Our ultimate goal is a swim team. We want it, and the kids want it,” she said.
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