‘I’ve broken some rules.’ Montgomery County boys basketball coach resigns
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Coach Jason Mays resigned after allegations of KHSAA recruiting bylaw violations.
- Alleged 2024 contacts sparked viral screenshots and a rapid district response.
- KHSAA will review claims as Montgomery names assistant Neil Terry acting coach.
Less than two hours after his school district announced his resignation, former Montgomery County High School boys basketball coach Jason Mays kept an appearance on a live local podcast and spoke directly to the controversy that has now cost him his job at two region championship programs.
“Everybody uses the word ‘recruiting’ in high school circles, and they don’t know what they’re talking about, OK. Plain and simple,” Mays said on the Mount Sterling-based “FromCorner2Corner Podcast,” streamed live Monday evening on Facebook. “The mobility of high school players now is alive and well. It’s not going anywhere. It’s not slowing down. It’s going to increase. And because of what happened to me in a public nature at Ashland, I’ve always had a target on my back, OK, for mistakes that I made, that I’ve owned, that you never saw a post of me arguing, of me playing the role of a victim …
“It doesn’t make me a bad person. It means I’ve broken some rules. I’ve crossed the line on some KHSAA bylaws because I, at times, made decisions to help kids and families — not financially — we’re not talking mafia stuff. You know, I’ve been accused of buying a kid’s house as a first-year teacher making, like, $42,000 a year. There’s nothing I haven’t been accused of. I’m not surprised by anything anymore.”
A statement posted on the Montgomery County school district’s Facebook page at 5:30 p.m. Monday and signed by schools superintendent Matthew D. Thompson, high school principal Holly Lawson and athletic director Dustin Lueker read in full: “Sunday night, November 30, 2025, we were made aware of allegations regarding potential KHSAA bylaw violations within our Boys Varsity Basketball program alleged to have occurred in 2024. The alleged bylaw violations do not involve any current or former Montgomery County student athletes.
“After a discussion with head coach Jason Mays this afternoon, he has resigned as basketball coach. Assistant coach Neil Terry will serve as acting head coach at this time.”
Kentucky High School Athletic Association rules include Bylaw 16, which forbids school officials from recruiting students from other member schools and outlines types of impermissible contact between school officials and prospective student athletes.
Mays, who took over Montgomery County in 2023 — just four months after being fired at Ashland Blazer in the wake of similar allegations — led the Indians to the 10th Region championship and the Boys’ Sweet 16 semifinals last season.
This preseason, Montgomery County was ranked as the No. 15 team in the state, according to the Herald-Leader Boys Basketball Preseason Top 25. It’s scheduled to open play at home Tuesday against West Virginia’s Huntington Expression Prep.
Mays coached Ashland Blazer from 2019 to 2022 and led the Tomcats to four consecutive 16th Region titles, including an undefeated 33-0 campaign in 2019-20 that was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Julian Tackett, commissioner of the Kentucky High School Athletic Association, released a statement to the Herald-Leader late Monday addressing Montgomery County’s situation without naming Mays.
“We received information this past weekend making allegations of violations of specific KHSAA rules that the membership has adopted, by a coach at Montgomery County,” Tackett said. “We are also aware of the announcement today of a coach in the school leaving his position. We will continue to work cooperatively with the school and district as next steps occur to resolve the situation.”
Allegations spread wide on social media
On Monday morning, Nate Bryan, a former Elizabethtown News-Enterprise sports writer who continues to be involved in high school sports coverage via his X.com account, posted a series of text message screenshots from an undisclosed source. In Bryan’s words, the source claimed the messages were “between a previously reprimanded (at a former school) coach and the mother of an unenrolled player.”
The obvious reference to Mays, the messages’ references to Montgomery County and the nature of what the messages said about moving and getting enrolled quickly went viral online.
By late Monday afternoon, word of Mays’ dismissal hit a high school message board on Bluegrasspreps.com. Within minutes, Montgomery County Public Schools posted its statement on Facebook.
At Ashland Blazer, school officials initially stood by Mays after a June 2022 violation report to the KHSAA and said they were handling the matter with undisclosed sanctions against the coach.
However, in the following months, a secretly recorded phone conversation purportedly between Mays and a prospective Ashland player’s parent leaked online. Kentucky is a one-party consent state regarding recorded conversations.
On Nov. 15, 2022, two weeks before the season’s tip-off, Ashland announced Mays’ dismissal after a renewed investigation upon urging from the KHSAA, according to the Ashland Daily Independent.
Coach says rules need to be in place
On Monday’s podcast, Mays explained the situation he says today’s coaches are facing.
“We have these bylaws in place which need to be in place? OK? They need to be in place. Commissioner Tackett, I applaud you and what you’ve done,” Mays said. “But coaches, in order to get to that optimal level, sometimes will wander into the gray area, all right. And my advice to coaches, when you feel yourself getting greedy over talent, you’re getting ready to get fired.”
Mays argued being “greedy” wasn’t his downfall.
“I never was greedy. My heart is just too open to helping these kids. And so if there’s a kid whose family wants to come here and they’re willing to move here and they’re willing to do things the right way and I’ve sent them text messages to make sure — because if I wasn’t communicating with them on some of that stuff, it probably wouldn’t have happened,” Mays said. “And I know that there’s some who wouldn’t have been able to experience what we do and be a part of our culture of champions.
“And I guess it’s arrogance on my part, where I thought that, well, this is the right thing to do for the kid. No one’s going to care, because I wouldn’t care if another coach did that. Because what’s best for the kid? Now, what that is is a justification of a wrong that I struggle to learn, pure and simple.”
Prior to Ashland, Mays — an Ohio native who moved to Georgetown as a high schooler and graduated from Scott County — was an assistant coach at Georgetown College under Happy Osborne and an interim head coach at Kentucky Wesleyan College. He said Monday he intends on continuing living in Montgomery County with his wife and family.
This story was originally published December 2, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
