South Pointe hires new athletic director after successful run at Charlotte school
South Pointe High School has hired a new athletic director.
Carlos Richardson, formerly the AD at Chambers High School in Charlotte for 11 years, will take up the mantle of the Rock Hill school’s athletic department.
Richardson is replacing Tom Sparks, who acted as the school’s interim athletic director for several months after Adam Hare stepped down from his AD post this past summer. The Rock Hill Schools Board of Trustees approved the administrative change at a meeting on Monday night.
The personnel move comes about a month after South Pointe hired Valarie Williams, a longtime educator in North Carolina, as its new principal.
Richardson has had a decorated career as a school administrator. In 2020, he was selected as a finalist for the North Carolina High School Athletic Association’s Director of the Year award. He also helped 95 students secure athletic scholarships over a five-year span, according to a release from Rock Hill Schools.
Before being an athletic director, Richardson taught English for nine years in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and in Bladensburg, Maryland.
You may have heard of Chambers High: The public school has accumulated five state titles in various sports over eight years, including two-straight 4AA state titles in football in 2019 and 2020.
But beyond that, the school made headlines in the summer of 2020 over its namesake. Chambers High School was originally called Vance High School, which was named after lawyer and Confederate military officer and twice-elected governor of North Carolina Zebulon Baird Vance. In Oct. 2020, though, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education voted to rename the school in honor of civil rights attorney Julius L. Chambers.
This story was originally published September 28, 2021 at 9:39 AM.
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