Bulldog of a challenge: Liberty Christian Academy seeks to become first private school to win VHSL football championship

It was December 2004, and Frank Rocco’s Liberty Christian Academy football team raised the state championship trophy in Rocco’s first season at the helm.

There was only one problem: It wasn’t the trophy Rocco ultimately wanted.

LCA, along with the rest of Virginia’s 100-plus private high schools, competed in the Virginia Independent Schools Athletic Association. Rocco’s vision was for his Bulldogs to compete against the public schools in the Virginia High School League.

Saturday, the LCA team Rocco still leads will have the opportunity he wanted nearly two decades ago. The Bulldogs will take the field not far from home — less than a mile, in fact — against Williamsburg’s Lafayette High at 5 p.m. inside Liberty University’s Williams Stadium for the VHSL Class 3 football title. If LCA prevails, it will mark the first time in the 110-year history of the VHSL that a private school’s team hoists a football trophy in any of the league’s six classifications.

Rocco, a Pennsylvania native and wildly successful prep football coach in the Pittsburgh area, came to Lynchburg in 2000 to serve as Liberty University’s offensive coordinator. In 2004, he took the job as athletic director and football coach at nearby LCA. Rocco and the rest of the LCA administration, many of whom came from outside Virginia, were puzzled by the VHSL’s restriction on private-school membership. Where they came from, that simply wasn’t the case.

“In America, we don’t say, ‘No, you stay over there. Don’t come over here,’” Rocco said of the former policy. “Forty-seven states all do it. Why can’t we try to make it work?”

After two LCA requests were denied by the VHSL, the private school decided to force the league’s hand in 2014 with a federal lawsuit. It worked. The two sides settled in the spring of 2015, allowing LCA to become the first private-school member of the VHSL starting in the 2015-16 academic year.

The Bulldogs have certainly made it work on the gridiron this season as well. LCA enters the state championship game with an unblemished 13-0 record. Behind the ability of junior running back Gideon Davidson, who is verbally committed to Clemson, and a senior-laden line, the Bulldogs have outscored opponents by a 596-102 margin.

“We’re all close in age, and we’re all connected,” Davidson said of the success. “We just love each other. It’s just that connection we have.”

Well thought-of in the preseason, LCA made an early statement in the Aug. 25 season opener with a 21-14 win over perennial power Salem. The Bulldogs haven’t missed a beat since, winning their next 12 games by at least three touchdowns. That culminated with a 49-6 victory over William Byrd in last weekend’s state semifinal game.

Lafayette, though, has also rolled through the latter part of its schedule. After a 4-2 start to the year (one of those losses was to the only VISAA school on the schedule, a 16-14 defeat to Richmond-based St. Christopher’s Sept. 1), the Rams have won eight in a row headed into Saturday. All four of Lafayette’s postseason wins came by double digits. The Rams are a perennial contender in their own right, winning VHSL championships in 2020 and 2001 and finishing runner-up four other times.

Rocco said Saturday will be a battle of two classic styles of football: the power of his Bulldogs against Lafayette’s speed and deception with their trademark Wing-T offense.

“If you are not disciplined with your eyes, you might as well forget about it,” the coach said of Saturday’s opponent.

Nothing illustrates Rocco’s own discipline and attrition like LCA’s quest to gain membership in the public-school league.

LCA first applied for VHSL membership in February 2006. It was denied. The school applied again in April 2008, clarifying in the request that the private school was willing and able to comply with all VHSL rules and a suggestion that, as in many other states, granted admission into public-school leagues with the caveat that, based on the inherently different geography from which private schools pull students, a multiplier be added to their enrollment number to place the teams in an appropriate classification. Denied again.

“We fought the good fight for a while trying to make it work,” Rocco said. “You have a great thing here. Let us in to benefit our student population and our families. That’s really the crux of the matter.”

On June 2, 2014, LCA filed a federal lawsuit against the VHSL. New York-based Winston & Strawn, a firm that had success in similar cases in other states, was the school’s lead counsel. The 29-page lawsuit provided a multi-faceted case for LCA, highlighting travel expenses, lost opportunities for revenue from ticket and concession sales (which the case argued would be much more profitable if they’d be allowed to play local public schools), and the higher level of competition the school’s teams would face if it gained membership.

“The travel expenses of taking a tennis team to Richmond to play a tennis match for 45 minutes and get back on the bus and drive back,” Rocco said. “They’re not doing homework. They’re not eating properly. They’re away from families. Wait a minute: let’s play Brookville and get home at 6 o’clock. … There’s got to be a better way for this.”

At that time, Virginia, Maryland and Texas were the only states in the U.S. that prohibited private schools from competing in the public-school associations. Maryland remains the only state in the union where that is the case.

“We’re a public school only association,” VHSL director of communications Mike McCall told The (Lynchburg) News & Advance in 2014, shortly after LCA filed the suit.

For Rocco’s part, once the attorneys got involved, it was largely out of his hands.

“I was [the] information provider,” he recalled this week.

The lawsuit requested a jury trial to decide LCA’s fate, but things never got that far. After its executive committee unanimously voted to do so and the membership approved it, the VHSL offered a settlement in May 2015. LCA and other private day schools would be allowed to join the public league provided they followed the existing eligibility rules for student-athletes. Some of those regulations, like academic performance, were actually less stringent under the VHSL rules than they were for VISAA. Others, like restrictions on eligibility for transfer students and the commonplace practice among private institutions of students “reclassifying” (essentially changing grades), were different. Students who had reclassified while LCA was still a VISAA member were eligible to compete in a one-year grace period, and the school had to discontinue the practice in the future. The VHSL also introduced a multiplying factor of 1.5 to establish LCA’s classification (VHSL schools are assigned to one of six classes based on their enrollments), meaning the Bulldogs essentially agreed to “play up” a classification in exchange for membership. All of this was agreeable to LCA, and the school became the VHSL’s first private member in 2015-16.

“Whatever we have to do to comply, we are you,” Rocco told The News & Advance in 2014.

Rocco stepped away from coaching football for a couple years to spearhead the transition. His son, Chris Rocco, who also works at LCA, took over the program on the field. The program that won three straight VISAA Division I championships from 2011-13 and lost in the state semifinals in 2014 went 7-4 in its first VHSL season, losing to Millbrook in the first round of the playoffs. The team posted 4-6 records the next two seasons, the second of which saw Frank Rocco back on the sideline. There were certainly some growing pains on the football field, the elder Rocco admitted.

“Trying to kind of fit in and figure out who we are and how we can compete,” Rocco said. “The Seminole District was a grinder compared to what we were playing. … It took a while to really just figure out our new environment, but it was what we wanted. We signed up for it.”

What LCA didn’t sign up for was the stories the rumor mill churned out in the Lynchburg region. Of course, the Bulldogs weren’t immune to hearsay when they were a VISAA member either.

“They have a good all-star team,” former Gretna football coach Kevin Saunders told The News & Advance after a season-opening loss to the Bulldogs in 2010, one of the rare contests between an area public school and LCA.

“They recruit,” Saunders continued without providing specifics. “It needs to be known. And that’s why this will probably be the last time a public school plays them.”

That prophecy proved false, but the speculation continues.

“It’s time Region 3C School Divisions all band together, and refuse to schedule Liberty Christian Academy in any of our sporting events,” Rockingham County School Board member Matt Cross posted on his official Facebook page shortly after LCA defeated a Rockingham school, Turner Ashby, in the state quarterfinals late last month. “If the VHSL is going to allow them to cheat, we should ALL refuse to play them. The VHSL is allowing our athletes to be cheated, by allowing LCA to not follow the same rules we all have to abide by! There’s no place for recruiting in High School sports. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH💯”

Cross, who did not provide evidence for his allegation of cheating or clarify which VHSL rules supposedly don’t apply to LCA, did not respond to multiple phone calls or emails this week. (Updated Dec. 8: Cross has been out of the country.)

Rocco said he lets that criticism roll off because his school has the truth on its side.

“We just want to remain above reproach,” the Bulldogs coach and athletic director said. “The beauty is that, whatever people want to say, if they ever want proof. If they ever want to come in and look at records, come on in and look at records. Look at attendance records. Look at where people live. … We’re an open book because we have to be.

“The VHSL,” Rocco continued, “you don’t think they were on their Ps and Qs when they finally let us in? … We have to follow everything in the handbook just like every other school around.”

VHSL executive director Billy Haun spoke plainly.

“They’re a member school,” Haun said. “We have 317 members, and they all follow the same set of rules.”

Haun said the VHSL essentially operates on an honor system for compliance with those rules.

“We are not the NCAA. I don’t have an investigative team,” Haun said. “I don’t have a group of people who go out into the schools. We trust our member schools to do what they are supposed to do.”

Haun added that LCA has been a model member of the VHSL since joining.

As for one of the accusations thrown at Rocco and his program — recruiting — the coach scoffed at the idea. He pointed to his team of 35 boys, which he said is many fewer than any of the teams they’ve played, and undersized star quarterback Jeb Moon, who stands 5 feet, 8 inches and weighs under 150 pounds. Aside from Davidson (who, like many of his teammates, has been at LCA since elementary school) and a few bulky linemen, the Bulldogs look somewhat pedestrian based on the proverbial eye test.

“If we’re recruiting, we aren’t doing a very good job of it,” Rocco said.

Rocco did admit frustration about one facet of the ongoing public debate. He said LCA often catches unfounded flak when students transfer to his school but that when students move from one public school to another, the outrage doesn’t seem to compare. Rocco noted that, on several occasions in the past seven years, students have transferred to LCA and sat out the VHSL-required 365 days before competing in athletics.

“The one thing that does irk you — and we try to keep it calm — we see it all around us,” Rocco said. “If they’re pointing fingers at us for things that don’t happen, but then we see this happen, and nobody says anything about it. To me, it almost sometimes feels like we’re a smokescreen.”

Some of that talk, Rocco speculated, revolves around families moving to Lynchburg, often to work at Liberty University, whose children wind up at Liberty Christian. He said that, while it’s true many families have moved to Lynchburg from out-of-state around the recent growth of LU, all area schools benefit from the influx.

“They get a lot of families [who] come in because LU is booming,” he said. “We get a lot of them, too, because of the Christian environment.”

Rocco remembers his own experience moving to the area in 2000 for a job at Liberty University.

“I put my own children in private school because it was a Christian school, and that was the faith-based situation my wife and I wanted,” Rocco said. “We didn’t have that up in Pittsburgh, and we wanted to take advantage of that opportunity here.”

In fact, that was one of Rocco’s first experiences with private schools outside of competing against them. A star quarterback at public Fox Chapel High in the Pittsburgh area (he and his wife, Leslie, met there), Rocco went on to Penn State University, where he quarterbacked the Nittany Lions. Later, he followed in his father’s football steps as a public high school coach in the Keystone State.

Why, Rocco asked, as a public-school product himself who has respect for the integrity of the education system and the teachers and administrators who dedicate their lives to it, would he recruit kids away from that environment?

“I can’t speak to what happened prior to 20 years ago, but I have never recruited a kid, a family. It has 100% been families coming and knocking on our door,” Rocco said.

He added that families whose kids apply to Liberty Christian sign a form asserting that the family, not the school, initiated first contact.

Rocco said that, rather than letting rumors frustrate him, he’s chosen to take the opportunity to be an ambassador, showing the community that his school indeed follows the rules the VHSL sets out. At 64 years old, Rocco said he’s closer to the end than the beginning of his career, and the legacy he’ll leave is important to him.

“If in any way I can really clear up and dispel stuff for the future of LCA … LCA is going to continue to be LCA because they are a tremendous institution,” he said. “I just pray some day that all the crazy stuff can just be put aside.”

The draw, Rocco added, comes from the quality of the school as well as its relative affordability. Tuition at LCA is $7,700 for 2023-24, just over half the Virginia private-school average of $15,222 per year, per Private School Review. (Tuition at Virginia Episcopal School across town is in the mid-$30,000s for day students and close to $60,000 annually for boarding students.)

“We’re a blue-collar, working man’s private school is what we are, and very much more akin to a public school than we are local private schools around here,” Rocco said.

That facet of Liberty Christian Academy meshes with the vision Jerry Falwell Sr. had for the school when he founded it as Lynchburg Christian Academy inside his Thomas Road Baptist Church in 1967. The year wasn’t a coincidence; Lynchburg city schools integrated in that year, and Falwell, The Lynchburg News reported at the time, was creating “a private school for white students.” It was part of a burgeoning movement for private evangelical schools following Brown v. Board of Education and other landmark cases that outlawed segregation in public schools, now known as “segregation academies.” What set LCA apart, religious education scholar Seth Dowland noted, was the demographics and political landscape of Lynchburg. At the time, the Hill City’s population was less than 20% Black (it was nearly 27% at the 2020 census), the second-lowest percentage among Virginia’s independent cities, and Lynchburg did not institute controversial busing policies that drew the ire of many whites at the time against desegregation. Segregation did not last long at LCA, however, and in a few years, a number of Black students attended class. Rocco said that early history has never been the LCA he knows, which he said is a friendly and inclusive place for students of all races.

Shortly after Rocco moved from coaching at LU to LCA, the school moved from the original Thomas Road Baptist Church building in midtown Lynchburg to its current location at the new TRBC, located on the old Montview farm on the south side of Lynchburg. It abuts the current site of Liberty University’s campus, and when Falwell founded LU as Lynchburg Bible College in 1971, oftentimes the grade-school and college students passed each other in the hallways going to class.

Today’s LCA has students ranging from preschool in its Early Learning Center up through the high school, which has 650 students in grades nine through 12. Its mission statement states that LCA “exists to support parents and guardians in their biblical responsibility to nurture and train their children. Thus, LCA provides opportunities that allow students to realize their God-given potential and to live lives that glorify God in spiritual, academic, social, physical, and vocational realms.” The growth has continued over the years, most recently with a new stadium for football and soccer along with an eight-lane track.

One thing hasn’t changed: from the very beginning and still in 2023, Liberty Christian views itself as a vital service to the Central Virginia communities it serves.

“LCA wants to be a good neighbor here, and we have great relationships with the local [public] schools,” former superintendent John Patterson told The News & Advance in 2015 after the VHSL allowed the private school in.

Those growing pains the football program experienced went away more quickly in other sports. LCA won the boys’ indoor and outdoor track & field in then-Group 4A (now called Class 4) championships. Baseball won the state title in 2017 and again in 2022. The LCA football program, which won seven VISAA titles between 1992 and 2013, followed not long after with success of its own. The Bulldogs were 13-0 headed into the 2021 Class 3 title game but fell short against Phoebus, 22-14. This season, they are looking to polish off a perfect year.

“It’s been kind of a whirlwind working together as a team on this journey,” Moon, the quarterback, said. “We didn’t really know what we’d be able to do coming into this [season], but I’m thankful for these opportunities that we’ve had to come up undefeated so far.”

What has impressed Rocco most about his team is its refusal to back down. When his Bulldogs take the field Saturday, there will be 35 players in uniform; most of the teams they’ve played this season, he said, dress 60 or 70 kids. Nine of the LCA players start on both offense and defense. The fact that LCA made it through a season with such low numbers and without major injury to this point, Rocco said, is a victory in itself.

“It’s just a dream season,” the coach said. “If you would have told me at the beginning of the season going into the Salem game that we would beat Salem and go on to have blowout wins against all the competition that we have, I would obviously not believed you.”

What has not surprised Rocco, however, is that other private institutions haven’t followed LCA into the VHSL. Nearly eight years later, LCA remains the only private school in the league.

“Because it’s hard,” Rocco said. “A lot of these private schools, they just can’t see committing to having nine through 12 have to be in that attendance zone because they draw from everywhere. We took that leap of faith that we can do it, and we’ve proven that we can.”

The model would not work for every VISAA school, either. Boarding schools, for example, were excluded from the VHSL’s 2015 exception. Virginia Episcopal School athletic director Bob Leake, who is retiring in the spring after 39 years on the job, said the VHSL regulations simply would not work for his Lynchburg-based institution. Well over half of VES’s students are boarding students, many of whom come from out of state or out of the country.

“It just wouldn’t be feasible for the way our schools operate to do that,” Leake said.

Many of VES’s teams do play games with area VHSL schools — the Bishops’ boys’ and girls’ basketball teams played LCA on Tuesday — and to do so, VES must must still fill out a disclosure form prior to the season, alerting would-be opponents if their teams include student-athletes who are receiving financial aid or have reclassified, both accepted practices in VISAA but not in the VHSL.

For his part, Leake said he was surprised more private schools, especially those in the major metro areas in the eastern and northern parts of the commonwealth, haven’t followed LCA’s lead.

But for the Bulldogs who will be on the field in Saturday’s championship game, the VHSL move is ancient history, and their distinction as the only private-school team in the league doesn’t really cross their minds. Understandable, since players like Davidson and Moon were in third grade when the decision came down.

“We’re just a bunch of high school kids hoping to win a state championship,” said Moon.

For their coach, though, a win would mean a lot.

“Our school has experienced championships before, but we really look at this as a more competitive road to the finals,” Rocco said.

And eight years removed from the battle to get in the door, Rocco said all the effort was worthwhile.

“Roaming in the wilderness for those years helped prepare us for where we are now,” the coach said. “I wasn’t ticked off. I was very thankful for the VHSL people, to be honest with you, the leadership, that they would see fit to do the right thing.”