In mid-December, Rob Grabill, who has coached the Hanover High boys soccer team for 19 years, set up a meeting with his boss, Athletic Director Megan Sobel, to go over the previous season and plan ahead for the 2025 campaign.

When they sat down on Dec. 19, Grabill quickly learned Sobel had a different agenda in mind. She delivered Grabill an ultimatum: Resign or be fired.

In an interview over coffee this week, Grabill told me that Sobel didn’t disclose what was behind the decision other than to say the school “wants to go in a different direction.”

I’m not sure which HR handbook that Sobel is following, but Grabill deserves better treatment.

It’s not only the seven state championships that Hanover captured with Grabill at the helm. He’s promoted a no-cut policy, meaning every Hanover High boy who wanted to play competitive soccer had the opportunity.

Last year, Hanover fielded four teams — a varsity and three sub-varsity squads — that attracted 96 players. Regardless of their skill level, “kids can play the sport they love,” Grabill said. “That’s the beauty of it.”

Over the years, Grabill has helped raise private money through Friends of Hanover Soccer to limit the cost to taxpayers of such a large program, which includes eight coaches.

Exeter High, which has nearly three times Hanover’s enrollment, is the only other New Hampshire school to support four boys soccer teams.

As Grabill acknowledges, since coaches work on one-year contracts, Sobel acted within her rights.

But that doesn’t make it right.

“It was so inelegant, so unnecessary,” Grabill said.

In the six weeks since the announcement was made, Sobel and other school administrators have had nothing of substance to say about why they were axing one of the most successful high school soccer coaches in state history.

“Ultimately, the decision was based on a thorough review of the program’s direction and the needs of our student-athletes,” Sobel told the Valley News in a story published on Jan. 16.

As athletic director, Sobel supervises 70 paid coaches and oversees 66 teams across 33 sports.

Before moving over to Hanover High in 2018, Sobel spent 15 years as an associate athletic director at Dartmouth.

Sobel seems to be under the false impression that she’s still working at a private institution that places little value on transparency. Sobel has forgotten — or is simply ignoring — that she’s now at a public school funded by tax dollars and accountable to the community.

The public deserves more of an explanation than school officials have provided. The usual it’s-a-personnel-matter excuse doesn’t cut it in this circumstance.

Even before Sobel told him that he was persona non grata, the 73-year-old Grabill was already thinking about a succession plan for the program. He just didn’t expect it to be this soon or abrupt.

The day after Sobel delivered the ultimatum, Grabill met with her and Hanover High Principal Julie Stevenson to propose a more graceful and sensible exit.

He asked to remain the coach for one more season. It would allow for a more orderly transition to a new coach (hopefully, someone from the current staff) and “we can end it on a positive note,” he said.

No go, Grabill said he was told.

“They made it clear that they didn’t want me to be the soccer coach,” he said.

It’s also become clear that school officials wanted to keep their fingerprints off the dirty deed.

Why else would Sobel suggest that Grabill announce that he was all of sudden giving up a job he loved rather her doing it?

Sobel has been at Hanover High long enough to know that ousting Grabill, a fixture in the New England soccer world for more than two decades, would reverberate beyond Hanover High. Community members, current and former players, along with the coaching fraternity were sure to ask questions — as well they should — about why Grabill was kicked to the curb.

To his credit, Grabill wouldn’t play along with the school’s charade.

After the 2024 season, he’d had one-on-one meetings in the school’s foyer with 70 returning players. He asked about their offseason plans. What other sports were they playing? How were their studies going? Did they have any new favorite movies?

“Eventually, we’d talk about soccer,” he said.

And then for him to announce shortly thereafter that he no longer wanted to coach at Hanover?

“I could not have sold that to the players,” he said.

After learning that his contract wasn’t being renewed, Grabill contacted Norwich attorney Geoffrey Vitt. Grabill told me that he has no intentions of turning his dismissal into a legal battle, but went to Vitt, who he has known for years, in hopes of starting a dialogue with school officials that could lead to rescinding the decision.

Vitt, who represented Norwich on the Dresden School Board for 14 years, was on the board committee that recommended the school hire Grabill in 2005.

Vitt suggested to Dresden Superintendent Jay Badams that they meet to talk about finding a resolution that both sides could live with. Vitt brought up bringing in a mediator. Badams responded that it wasn’t necessary. He stood behind Sobel’s decision.

“Coach Grabill placed respect at the top of his priority list, celebrating awards for academics and sportsmanship more than state championships,” Vitt said. “The athletic director now claims that the boys soccer program is no longer being run with the primary focus being the growth and success of student-athletes, on an off the field. There is no basis for this criticism.”

At 4:18 p.m on Dec. 30, Sobel sent an email to Grabill about the upcoming “announcement,” regarding the end of his Hanover High tenure.

“Have you reconsidered sending out something yourself?” Sobel wrote. “If not, I plan to send an announcement tomorrow, but I want to give you one last opportunity to share any message you feel would best reflect your time with the program.

“Please let me know either way by tomorrow morning.”

By breaking the news on New Year’s Eve was Sobel counting on people enjoying too many libations to be paying attention? She wouldn’t be the first public official to time the announcement of an unpopular move around a holiday.

This week, I emailed Sobel to ask about the timing and more about what went into her decision. I didn’t hear back.

When a longtime coach of Grabill’s stature is no longer welcome — the school shut off his email account and ordered him to hand over his school keys — it’s natural for people to jump to conclusions, to think there must be more to the story than what’s being told to the public.

Grabill figures “a lot of people are saying, ‘OK, what did he do?’ ”

Badams told the Valley News last month that “it’s safe for me to say that there was nothing horrible, no harm to children or anything like that.”

This week, Badams declined to comment further than his earlier statement. “Without going into the details,” he said in January, “I believe that the administration has been working with the coach over the course of the past few years on a number of different issues.”

Such as?

Grabill mentioned a one-game suspension, handed down by Sobel and Stevenson, that he served during the 2023 season. He had posted a less than flattering comment on social media about an opposing team. Grabill believed the opponent had failed to “honor the game” of soccer by not putting its best foot forward, so to speak, in a 14-3 loss to Hanover.

“I was unnecessarily frustrated,” Grabill told me this week.

The suspension was “fair,” he added. “I learned from my mistake.”

In spite of his success, Grabill can’t be accused of being a winning-is-everything coach.

For many years before Grabill became the coach and for several years afterwards, Hanover dominated New Hampshire’s Division II, which consists of mid-size schools. Grabill pushed Hanover school officials to move up to Division I. The team would face stiffer competition and fewer opportunities for easy, confidence-building easy wins, but that was fine with him.

“Hanover kids don’t need more self-esteem,” said Grabill, speaking as someone who has lived in the upscale community for 35 years and with his wife, Debra, raised their two children.

Hanover, the smallest school in Division I, has still managed to win two state titles and finish runner-up four times since making move a dozen years ago.

This week under the state’s Right-to-Know law, I requested all emails and text messages exchanged between school officials regarding Grabill’s firing.

Badams responded in a timely fashion. On Friday, he sent me a batch of the communications, some of which I had a chance to review shortly before press time. The emails shed more light on why Grabill had fallen out of favor with his boss. 

In a Jan. 13 email to Badams, Sobel provided “additional documentation regarding Coach Grabill.” 

She included notes from an Oct. 18, 2023 meeting with Grabill, where she addressed, among other things, “sportsmanship issues including blog posts complaining about officials.”

Sobel wrote that she had received a phone call from a soccer official who was concerned that Grabill’s “use of profane language is getting worse and is constantly on the officials, harping at them up and down the field.”

In his blog, Grabill “demeans officials,” Sobel wrote in her lengthy email to Badams.

I called Grabill on Friday afternoon to talk about what the official, whom Sobel didn’t identify, had said about his sideline conduct. Grabill told me that he has a good rapport with most officials, but there’s always an “outlier.” Since word spread across the state of his ouster, Grabill said he’s received “a lot of unsolicited emails from officials who have complimented me on the way Hanover teams conducted themselves.”

Regardless of the dossier that Sobel has put together, I’m still not convinced that Grabill has done anything so egregious that he doesn’t deserve a chance to coach for a 20th — and final season. A farewell tour, if you will.

Last June, Grabill, an ordained minister, retired as director of religious education at Dartmouth’s United Christ Church. This winter, he’s filling in at various   New Hampshire churches on Sund ay mornings.

“Soccer,” he said, with a smile, “has always been a side hustle.”

Grabill said he wants to continue coaching at a public high school. “I’m pretty sure  some school will make me an offer that  I can’t refuse,” he said.

Hanover High hasn’t seen the last of him, either. In March, he’ll help le  ad a group of 10 students, only two of which are soccer players, on a week-long trip to the poverty-stricken Dominican Republic. He’s been taking students on the trip for a decade.

They spend the week tutoring at an urban elementary school, where kids arrive at 10 a.m. for what for many is their first meal of the day.

The week outside the “Hanover bubble,” Grabill said, “is a incredibly broadening experience for students. It shows them a different world.”

Grabill might be done coaching in Hanover, but he’s not finished making a difference.

Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.