Berkeley High Track & Field coach shakeup; details scarce
"Where the district could improve is awareness of what coach-athlete conduct should look like," one parent said Wednesday.
Days before one of the year's biggest meets, Berkeley High announced that its longtime head Track & Field coach no longer ran the program.
In an email Thursday to the "Track & Field Community," a Berkeley High vice principal said Brad Johnson — a 15-year program veteran who himself ran track as a BHS student — was no longer in charge "effective immediately."
The email gave no reason for Johnson's departure, thanking him "for his contribution and long standing commitment" and wishing him well "in his next chapter."
Johnson is the finance director for the city of Oakland, where he has worked since 2010, according to his LinkedIn page.
Johnson led Berkeley High's Track & Field program on his own for over a decade, overseeing many coaches who focus on individual events, parents said.
This spring, for the first time, BHS added a co-head coach to the roster.
On Wednesday, neither the Berkeley Unified School District nor Johnson responded to media inquiries from The Scanner seeking further details.
In the past week, multiple parents — who asked to remain anonymous — asked The Scanner to try to learn more about what happened as rumors began to circulate.
"All the parents were like, "Wait, this is weird. What's going on?" one of them told The Scanner.
Parents have been sharing information among themselves but, for many, details remain slim.
"The timing of it's unfortunate for the kids," another parent said, coming a week before the season ended. "I trust that the district did not make a rash decision."
"As a longtime parent on the team, it would be nice to have answers. You trust coaches to be with your kids," they continued, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Where the district could improve is awareness of what coach-athlete conduct should look like."
"I do think boundaries were blurred," they said, adding that it can be hard to tell the difference between an "above-and-beyond coach" and behavior that crosses a line.
Berkeley High's cross country and track & field team is one of the largest in the region, with about 250 students who participate.
On Monday, the new head coach for BHS Track & Field, Danielle Perez (the prior co-head coach with Johnson), sent her own email to parents and students.
"Our program is going through a very challenging, major change to our team's fabric and structure," she wrote. "Many student athletes are feeling very real and difficult emotions right now."
"This change will be felt as a real loss for many, and those feelings will be complex and different for every individual," she continued.
According to the email, counseling services were made available this week to students at the BHS Wellness Center.
"The biggest challenges can't be erased or ignored, but they can be shared," Perez wrote.
According to his online bio, Johnson was on Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School’s first cross country team in Berkeley before running varsity Cross Country and Track & Field at Berkeley High for four years.
In college, he was a team captain for the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Stags.
Johnson was hired in the Track & Field and Cross Country program at Berkeley High in 2009, becoming Cross Country head coach in 2011 and head coach over the entire program in 2015, according to his profile.
"I started coaching because I wanted to come back and give to my high school, the place I grew up, the experience I had in college, which was a deeper connection to team, to community, to something bigger," he said in a 2024 interview about the program.
