After his first season coaching the Brockton High football team last fall, Patriots champion Jermaine Wiggins immediately started planning offseason workouts for the winter and spring.

Wiggins – out of his “love for giving back to kids” – also helped his student-athletes off the field, ensuring they were getting the “right grades” and setting themselves up to be recruited and play in college.

Wiggins earned a coaching stipend of just over $15,000 for the role, one he no longer has because he wasn’t a member of the Brockton Education Association, he said.

“I was going back to coaching,” Wiggins told the Herald Thursday afternoon, “but I guess there were a lot of people who were complaining that I wasn’t in the union and the way I got hired so they figured they wanted to go in a different direction.”

“I wouldn’t have gotten into it if I was going to be one and done,” he added.

Wiggins’ comments came after the Herald reported Thursday morning how a law firm, investigating an $18 million budget shortfall in the city’s public schools, alleged Superintendent Michael Thomas “circumvented proper protocols” in hiring the former Patriot.

Thomas, earning $256,939 on paid administrative leave, tapped Wiggins as Brockton High’s head football coach in April 2023.

The hiring, detailed this week in a city-sponsored report from Boston-based Nystrom, Beckman & Paris, shifted away from an agreement between the teachers’ union and Brockton School Committee that preference “shall be given to a (union member) when (he/she) has equal or greater qualifications than another applicant.”

The agreement also establishes a stipend amount for coaching positions.

Wiggins, a co-host of WEEI’s Greg Hill Show, was not a member of the Brockton Education Association. Thomas sent Wiggins a draft contract to be a “mentor and head football coach” with a salary of $100,000 around the time of his hiring, Nystrom, Beckman & Paris reported.

The figure surprised Wiggins who reacted to the Herald’s story on air Thursday morning.

“That is news to me,” he said. “Let me get out my calculator, ’cause somebody owes me some money.”

Speaking to the Herald later Thursday, Wiggins emphasized how he earned the coaching stipend of $15,389 and how if it were a $100,000 union job, he’d still be coaching this fall.

“I loved doing it,” Wiggins said, “and it was more than just the money.”

“It was the love of helping out the kids and giving back to kids that grew up very similarly to me,” he added, “in a single-parent household, having to deal with the things that come with living in a lower-income area and making sure you’re staying on the straight and narrow.”

Thomas looked to cover Wiggins’ salary with the Shannon Grant, funding designated to “help youth between the ages of 10 and 24 who are at risk for gang involvement,” Nystrom, Beckman & Paris’ report states.

Thomas went on medical leave in August 2023, around the time the budget deficit became public. James Cobbs who subsequently took over as acting superintendent last year, directed the district to “withdraw the grant application,” the report states.

Wiggins, who starred at East Boston High School in the early 1990s and helped the Patriots win their first Super Bowl in 2001, agreed to the coaching stipend after Cobbs negotiated with the teachers’ union to allow him to stay on at the $15,389 amount that other coaches make, the law firm found.

Thomas, on paid administrative leave since February, called into Thursday morning’s Greg Hill Show, offering his perspective. The coach-mentoring role, which aimed to serve over 1,000 student-athletes, is a position that the athletic department has never had, he said.

“I hired a guy who grew up exactly like those kids in a single-parent home, worked his you know what off to get where he was and where he is now,” Thomas said of Wiggins. “That kind of knowledge he has, that kind of experience, you can’t teach people.”

“Mike Thomas had a great vision and everything,” Wiggins told the Herald, “and unfortunately it wasn’t able to work out the way he saw it.”

In Wiggins’ only season, the team went 3-8, which included a 1-5 start. The Boxers did not beat a team with a winning record and lost in blowout fashion to Barnstable, Andover and Pinkerton Academy of Derry, N.H.

Nystrom, Beckman & Paris alleged Thomas “hired, promoted, awarded stipends to, and created positions for friends and people he had connections to, often circumventing proper protocols.”

Its investigation found Thomas had hired his alleged “personal mechanic and friend” as the director of the district’s transportation department at a salary of $102,000.

The firm also blasted Chief Financial Officer Aldo Petronio and Deputy Chief Financial Officer Chris Correia, both on leave, for failing to “track spending on an ongoing basis and compare that spending to the budget approved by the School Committee.”

In an interview with the Brockton Enterprise earlier this week, Thomas said the key takeaway from the city-sponsored report is how it states: “We did NOT find evidence of misappropriation of funds by any City or School Department employee. We found no evidence of financial fraud, theft, or related criminal conduct.”