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A Botta Cornerstone: Excellence in Athletics
A Botta Cornerstone: Excellence in Athletics
By Leonard Shapiro
It was not the sort of start Brett Botta had exactly hoped for as the fledgling coach of Cornerstone Christian Academy’s eighth grade girls basketball team playing its very first game in the Middleburg school’s young history.
It was the opening tipoff, and the ball was actually controlled by a Cornerstone player who shall remain un-named.
Unfortunately, in those early jittery seconds, Cornerstone did make the basket, except at the wrong basket, and was immediately trailing by two points.
“I was a little embarrassed,” Botta said, but not for long. The Cornerstone Guardians went on to score the next 40 points and won the game, 42-3, the first of 18 straight victories on the way to an undefeated season.
Botta, the school's 33-year-old athletic director, said he tried everything he could not to run up the score that day. He even had his players intentionally foul opponents, just to give them a few more chances to score on free throws. It was all to little avail against a team that also shall remain un-named, for the obvious reasons.
In its first year during the 2023-24 school year, Cornerstone, then K-8, had great success with its athletic program under Botta’s direction. The girls soccer team went 10-0. The boys basketball team was 15-3. At a major girls cross country meet in Fairfax, with 20 schools competing, they took first, second and fifth places.
This year, the school added a ninth grade and eventually plans to go K-12. The Guardians will compete in 11 sports, including two co-ed—golf and track.
“We want strong academics and strong athletics,” Botta said. “We’re going to build a culture where we compete really, really hard. We started last fall with no expectations except we wanted to give the kids an opportunity to compete for their school.
“Our plans are to do things really well. We want people to see our teams and say ‘hey, we want to be part of that, we want to go play there.’ We know it’s going to take some time and it’s not just all about winning. But winning is a byproduct of excellence and doing things well. And sports brings a lot of people together.”
Botta has seen that first hand. One of four boys, his father Sam, now head of school at Cornerstone, was a long-time and highly-successful high school basketball coach in New Jersey and went on to be athletic director and head baseball coach at Regent University in Newport News, where Brett grew up.
He played basketball, volleyball and golf in high school, graduated from Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, and earned a Masters in sports administration at the University of North Carolina, where he also began working in the school’s athletic department.
For five years, he was director of the Dean E. Smith Center Complex at UNC, managing day-to-day operations, events, scheduling, finances, facility improvements, and more.
“I had a dream job,” he said. “My wife Zoe and I had our first child (Ava) in September, 2022, and going into the basketball season at Carolina, it was 18 to 20 hours a day non-stop. I loved it, but it wasn’t really sustainable for us as a new and growing family.
“When this came about (at Cornerstone), it was the perfect opportunity to combine my passion for sports, my ability to organize and plan and to be involved with a Christian school. I just couldn’t ask for anything better.”
