“I kind of felt like something was off because of [Gordon’s] facial expression, but I didn’t want to think negatively,” Wilkins said. “It was all new to me, and hearing that an hour before my game hurt me.”
Wilkins, a 6-foot-4 senior who is committed to play at West Virginia, played most of his high school career at Theodore Roosevelt but transferred to Wise in May and finished the school year there after his family moved to Upper Marlboro. Despite months as a Wise student, training with the team over the summer and competing in the Pumas’ season opener against Maury, he learned the Prince George’s County board of athletics identified residency discrepancies in his transfer application and ruled him ineligible.
The Office of Interscholastic Athletics for the county did not respond to multiple requests for explanation from The Post.
Wilkins and his family are left to navigate a complex appeals process and what they see as a lack of transparency from county officials. And No. 11 Wise (3-1), which hosts Laurel on Friday, must go on without their left-handed signal-caller, who last year led Theodore Roosevelt to a second straight D.C. Interscholastic Athletic Association title before being named Turkey Bowl MVP.
Transferring, an increasingly common practice and a hot topic in college football, also occurs often locally at the high school level for a variety of reasons — and the influence of one player, particularly a quarterback, can be massive.
In Wilkins’s case, his move was great timing for the Pumas, who were looking for a new quarterback after the graduation of Cortney Davis, a transfer himself who helped lead Wise to an 11-2 record.
Wise, which opened in 2006, has become an attractive destination for football players, given the success of Coach DaLawn Parrish’s program. The Pumas have won four Maryland 4A titles since 2015 and are perennially one of the top public school programs in the D.C. area. So if a football family is considering a move, it could do worse than the Upper Marlboro area.
Wilkins said he knew changing teams would spark gossip from opponents and former teammates. But he and his family say the move was prompted by “personal family circumstances.” They declined to elaborate with more specifics about why they moved, citing privacy concerns.
“I turned all of Khalil’s paperwork in prior to the football season,” said his mother, Lindsay Wilkins, who has been leading the effort to appeal the ruling against her son. “I transferred Khalil here at the end of the third quarter [his junior year]. So all of this was just confusing to me. … Why was this all of a sudden coming up the day of the game? And I couldn’t get any answers.”
As her son sat on the bench during the Eleanor Roosevelt game in Week 2, she received an email from the county athletics office notifying her of the decision to rule Wilkins ineligible.
Frustrated by the vague explanation, she asked for an appeal hearing to get more information and, she hoped, to overturn the decision. But with several county officials involved in the decision out of the office the following week, Lindsay Wilkins says the preliminary hearing over Google Meets on Sept. 13 yielded few answers and provided no clarity about her son’s status.
“It honestly has discouraged me somewhat,” she said. “We are in a position where we have to wait to see what the decision is going to be on his appeal.”
Parrish, Wise’s coach, said eligibility issues have cropped up on his team the past few years. This season, junior linebacker Tyvon Callaway-Toles also was instructed to sit out future games, and at least one other player stepped away from the Pumas entirely to avoid the lengthy appeals process.
“Kids talk. So they’re very frustrated. … But you learn that in Prince George’s County, you can only deal with your house,” Parrish said, emphasizing the need for his team to focus on what it can control.
Other teams in the county have been hit with player investigations too, including Wise’s rival, No. 7 C.H. Flowers. Three players who transferred to the Jaguars have been sitting out of games while they wait for clearance, but Flowers Coach Dameon Powell says it hasn’t slowed them down.
“Of course they’re pieces to the puzzle, but at the end of the day it’s out of our control, out of our hands,” Powell said. “So we just got to wait for the process.”
For Wise, the last-minute replacement of their starting quarterback has caused more of an upheaval.
“It has definitely been a distraction and it definitely had an effect on team morale, especially with the timing of this decision,” Gordon, the athletic director, said.
The Pumas have quickly shown an ability to overcome it, though.
Sophomore Eric Wedge, Jr. has moved into the quarterback role in Wilkins’s absence, and after a 22-16 win against Eleanor Roosevelt right after the Wilkins news broke, the Pumas pummeled Parkdale and Oxon Hill by a combined score of 112-0.
In his second year on varsity, Wedge “knows our offense in and out,” Parrish said. He has been mobile in the pocket and unafraid to run the ball, averaging nearly 25 yards per carry. He has kept the Pumas’ offense prolific and unpredictable, even without the big-play passing threat of Wilkins.
Wilkins says his entire team has been trained to push past obstacles. He says his scholarship with West Virginia is not in jeopardy, but he’s still itching to play his senior year with the Pumas.
“I play the position of quarterback, so I’m pretty familiar with having to stay strong mentally,” Wilkins said. “This is just a test, or adversity, that I will beat.”