CHARLOTTE (QUEEN CITY NEWS) – After the Myers Park High School football team was forced to forfeit the 2021-22 season over players not officially living in the district, QCN is finally hearing from the parents who sponsored the athletes who played in last year’s games.

Sources told Queen City News that Steven and Carla Lenhoff were the two who recruited football players from across the country and are to blame for the scandal.

When a Queen City News crew approached Steven Lenhoff on Wednesday and asked for comment, he immediately kicked the crew off his property and didn’t answer any questions.

But in an about-face, on Thursday, both Lenhoffs talked exclusively to Queen City News off-camera. They were very open, they were very frank about the situation. They tell us they signed all of their paperwork and they did their due diligence.

Their biggest ‘hang up,’ and what bothers them the most, is that no one from NCHSAA, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, or Myers Park reached out to them to ask questions or figure out what was happening.

Steven: “No one talked to us.”
Carla: “NO!”
Steven: “No one wanted to find out. But everyone loves rumor. No one talked to us. Nobody. Nobody tried to find out…”
Carla: “I literally talked…I literally don’t even think I said two words to the principal.”
Steven: “No, no one asked. We would have talked to [them], we told them everything, you know, and at the end of the day…”
Carla: “But, but what’s so crazy is is that we’ve been here for two years.”
Steven: “We haven’t been hiding anything…you saw us, you seen tonight, we’re not… everyone knows, people in the stands would come up to me and shake my hand and said, ‘appreciate you for what you do for these kids.'”

They said they initially declined to comment because they had no idea any of these infractions had to do with their kids and didn’t want to talk about other kids.

“It’s my understanding that…when the parents turned in the stuff it was approved. They had an address within the district, a legitimate address within the district, and you know, the parents were guardians as best as they were possibly able to. And we just filled in the gap,” said Steven Lenhoff.

The Lenhoff’s say this was not about football, football was the common denominator between their son Lucas and the kids they brought with them to Charlotte. But the driving factor, according to them, was just to help kids without a family.

“You know, for Carla and myself, we’ll do this a thousand times over, I wish we could have had a hundred kids we could have helped. There’s only so much we could do,” said Steven Lenhoff.

PaParents of football players Queen City News spoke with off-camera said, it was common knowledge that some of the players weren’t from North Carolina. One student told Queen City News that it was something everyone knew about.