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Find out what's happening in Manassas Parkwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Remember: It may be Halloween, but that doesn’t mean your home has to be scary! With regular, proactive maintenance, Thumbtack can help you continuously care for your home so it’s in perfect shape all year long.

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On the final play of the first day of practice, the Manassas Park quarterback floated the ball in the air before the receiver caught it and ran into the end zone.

For most high school football teams, a routine play like this might warrant nothing more than tacit approval from the coaches as players find their footing and many more practices await them.

But Mark Teague had other plans. As soon as the receiver crossed the goal line, Manassas Park High School’s first-year head coach urged the rest of the players to join their teammate for a celebration.

With the Cougars once again rebuilding a program that since 2018 has twice canceled its varsity season, Teague will use any opportunity he can to create optimism. Moments like this, however small, provide a start toward achieving that goal.

“The last play of practice will always be a touchdown,” Teague said. “We want to end on something positive.”

On Oct. 8, Mark Teague completed a two-day, 16-hour drive from Louisiana to Virginia with one goal in mind: To convince Manassas Park High Sch…

STARTING OVER

Manassas Park has struggled over the past 10 years.

Other than a 5-4 record in 2019 against an independent schedule, the Cougars have posted only one winning season since 2012 and have gone 0-10 twice.

The lack of success has played a big role in the Cougars’ inability to generate interest among students to try out for the team. Manassas Park canceled its 2022 season due to low numbers and had to find a new head coach after Randy Starks resigned the day before the school announced the cancellation.

Enter Teague.

The 53-year-old has developed a reputation for embracing the challenge of running struggling programs plagued by little interest and changing demographics.

At his first stop, The Howard School in Chattanooga, Tenn., eight players attended the program’s first offseason workout. The team went 0-10 before winning two games the following season and losing three more by small margins.

After two seasons there, Teague took over at Bolton High School in Louisiana. The year before, Bolton went 0-10 with only 17 players. In six years under Teague, Bolton went 15-41 and never reached the playoffs. But Teague still saw improvement. Bolton’s best season was 2020, when the program went 4-3 to post its first winning record since 2001.

Understanding the tall task awaiting him at Manassas Park, Teague ignored all the naysayers outside of the school who told him it was a mistake to take the job. They described the situation as a Dumpster fire, “where coaches go to die” and career suicide.

Instead, the muscular Teague, who bears a slight resemblance to actor Jamie Foxx, arrived at Manassas Park officially as a teacher and coach on Nov. 1 and quickly went to work. Full of energy and inspirational quotes, the two-time cancer survivor walked the halls, talking to anyone who might have a faint interest in football.

He assembled a nine-person coaching staff that includes assistants Herman Carter and Kyle Meyer, who ran offseason workouts until Teague arrived.

Teague made an immediate impression on two returners: senior Joel Castillo and junior Javier Cisneros. Both were disappointed about having no season in 2022, but they remained hopeful for 2023, especially if the right coach was in place.

Cisneros, a former wrestler, is in only his second year of football. But he’s encouraged by the desire to learn the sport from an individual dedicated to making them better and feel connected.

“He can relate to you,” Cisneros said.

Castillo, who started playing football in middle school, decided to come back out as a sign of loyalty. Teague’s hire sealed his commitment.

“The first time I met him he gave this enthusiastic speech,” Castillo said. “It felt right.”

BOOSTING MORALE

Teague is doing his best to change the culture so that playing for Manassas Park football is a source of pride.

He believes there is plenty of interest and savors built-in advantages to bolster the program. Teague loves that the middle school is right next to the high school to serve as a pipeline. The spacious, well-appointed facilities are the envy of coaches at bigger schools.

The key, Teague said, is getting the kids to trust in him and what he’s doing. His first goal was to focus on infrastructure.

“It’s not always the kids,” Teague said. “You have to lift the hood and see why the car is not running.”

To boost spirits and awareness, he encouraged the players to recruit others to join the team.

He constantly wears his Manassas Park shirt to serve as a human billboard for the program. He provided T-shirts for his coaching staff and his players that feature the same front and back images in either gold or black, Manassas Park colors.

The shirt’s front says “Cougar Football,” with the eyes of a cougar between the words.

The back says “Single Wing Domination,” a reference to Teague’s offense. It’s a phrase an interviewer used when talking to Teague about the single wing, which Teague prefers to help kids adapt quicker to football. So with the interviewer’s permission, Teague adopted the phrase as a branding tool. To create team unity, the players and coaches will switch out their shirts each day.

Teague also brought in a special guest to speak to the players during the first two days of practice.

Chavis Daniels was a central character in the 2011 Oscar-winning documentary “Undefeated.” The movie chronicled Daniels and his teammates at Manassas High School in Memphis during the 2009 season, when they reached the playoffs for the first time in school history.

After overcoming anger issues and spending time in juvenile detention, Daniels turned his life around and sought ways to help others avoid his mistakes.

Given the two programs’ struggles, Teague saw a similarity between the Memphis school and Manassas Park.

“I wanted to tie the two together,” Teague said. “The timing was perfect.”

When he took the job, Teague stressed that he was here to build a program, not a team. Knowing it would take time, Teague told Manassas Park he was in this for the long haul.

To underscore his point, Teague said he wants to become the Cougars’ all-time winningest coach, topping Jeff Lloyd, who totaled 81 victories.

Teague likes what he’s seen so far, calling the first day of practice the best he’s had in his 20-plus years as a football coach. He’s grateful for all the support he’s received from the school and community.

Manassas Park had 38 players out that first day, a marked improvement from a year ago, when the team averaged a turnout of 11 players over the first seven days it held a practice. Teague said he hopes to have at least 50 once other players return from vacation.

As he concluded the first day of practice, Teague kept finding ways to connect with his players. After Daniels spoke, Teague mentioned that Memphis is right across the Mississippi River from Arkansas, near where Teague once coached.

To lighten the mood, Teague asked whether any of the players knew where Arkansas was. One thought he did, but he was mistaken.

Teague, ever encouraging, let it go. At this point, he wanted to make sure the player knew how to run with the ball and hit the right hole.

“We can figure out geography later,” Teague said.

Updated 5 p.m. — A decision on who will build its new anchor movie theater in Manassas Park could come by spring.

The city’s Economic Development Director A. LaMar Hoy, said on Wednesday, January 11, the city is considering multiple options when comes to building a space for a new movie theater in the city’s burgeoning downtown area, Park Central.

In one option, the city’s Governing Body could provide a loan to the city’s economic development authority to developer Norton Scott, which had already built the majority of the Park Central neighborhood — including a new city hall and library that opened last summer.

The details of how much the loan would cost taxpayers are still being worked out. Other options on the table include using proffer funds to build the building that will house the cinema or partnering with a developer who will agree to construct the building outright.

The EDA is an independent business lending origination tasked with attracting new business and improving existing agencies.

The city has partnered with Hampton Roads-based Cinema Cafe, a movie theater /restaurant concept, to fill the space. Once open, it will be Cinema Cafe’s first Northern Virginia location.

City officials say the cinema will be a draw to the new downtown neighborhood, located on Manassas Drive. When finished, it will have 300 condos, a 700-space parking garage next to the city’s Virginia Railway Express station, and Jirani Coffeehouse and La Finca Mexican Restaurant.

Jirani Coffeehouse and La Finca will expand from their locations in Manassas and Gainesville. Both are expected to open later this summer.

A year ago, the Cinema Cafe planned to build the theater. However, rising construction costs and a labor shortage threw a wrench into their plans. The developer told the city it was longer willing to take the risk.

City leaders returned to the drawing board and, once again, approached Norton Scott with a similar public-private partnership deal it used to build its city hall building, where the developer covers the construction cost and builds, allowing the city to lease back the building, allowing the developer to recoup its costs.

The movie theater could be open as soon as April 2025, while the 300 condos should be move-in ready by December 2025.

A VRE parking garage will open by December 2024, providing commuters with a place to park their car during the day and giving movie-goers and visitors parking on evenings and weekends.

The city held a ribbon cutting for its new city hall/library building in July 2022, marking the opening of the city’s long-envisioned downtown neighborhood, now called Park Central.

Hoy said the city would also work to attract new retail stores to the center and a coworking facility where government contractors, remote company employees, and entrepreneurs can work remotely outside their homes.

Hoy provided this information during the Prince William Chamber of Commerce’s annual Future of the Region symposium at 4 p.m. Wednesday, January 11, 2023, at Old Hickory Golf Club in Woodbridge. Economic development directors from Manassas and Prince William County also presented during the event, attended by about 100 business and elected leaders.

Hoy said his city is working to differentiate itself from its neighbors, Manassas and Prince William County, which have successfully attracted advanced manufacturing and data center jobs, respectively.

“We can’t work to be Manassas, and we can’t work to be Prince William. We have to stay in our lane and figure out what works best for us,” said Hoy.

Virginia’s "newest downtown" is getting its much sought-after parking garage.

Officials broke ground Thursday on Manassas Park’s Virginia Railway Express station parking garage, a 540-space structure adjacent to the train stop that will serve commuters as well as business patrons in the city’s growing downtown. It’s expected to open in 2025.

The fanfare Thursday morning – a full groundbreaking ceremony with speakers from across the region's transportation body – was beyond what one might expect for a parking garage, but city officials say the new lot will be a linchpin for its downtown development, what’s being dubbed Park Central.

With the new city hall and library building complete, and as the 300 new Stanley Martin townhomes go up nearby, developer Norton Scott is waiting for work on the garage to gain steam before building its eight-screen movie theater next door to serve as an entertainment anchor for the area. Once the theater is completed, coffeeshop Jirani’s and Mexican restaurant La Finca are expected to open their new locations in the city hall building.

“That’s how you get the right parking numbers for the theater and all the restaurants, is through the garage,” City Manager Laszlo Palko told InsideNoVa. “The theater is the most important part from an anchor standpoint, but they need each other. The theater needs the garage to be able to make it here.”

The 540 spots in the garage will be complemented by another roughly 200 spots on surface lots nearby, doubling in use for both rail commuters and nearby business patrons, satisfying a need that Palko said hobbled earlier retail and restaurant hopes for prior iterations of the city center plan.

But while much of the attention Thursday morning was on what the garage would do for the downtown development, transportation officials are also hoping it will achieve its stated goal: adding parking capacity for rail commuters when more ridership returns.

The garage and attached pedestrian bridge over the train tracks will cost over $34.6 million, with funding from the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority, the city, I-66 Outside the Beltway concessionaire payments, the I-66 Commuter Choice program from the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission and the Virginia Department of Rail and Transportation.

VRE ridership has continued to bounce back from its losses during the pandemic, but still remains well below pre-COVID levels. Average daily ridership has remained steady at over 6,000 throughout the year, a significant year-over-year jump but still only about one-third of the system’s 2019 ridership.

“The folks that commute on VRE, they love VRE. It’s consistent, it’s clean, it’s convenient, it’s a great option to help meet your transportation needs,” DRPT Director Jennifer DeBruhl said Thursday morning. “And here in Manassas Park, … the parking expansion is a big step forward into the future. It will help us increase ridership and add to the many reasons why people do love the VRE.”

Transportation officials around the region are hopeful that trains will keep filling up as more workers return to offices and that ridership will really take off as evening, weekend and bi-directional service begins as part of the Transforming Rail in Virginia project.

Manassas Park leaders, meanwhile, hope that the increased service will make their city more attractive to live and play in, and that the new garage will fix a pre-COVID problem, when cars would park along side streets and pathways when the lot would fill up.

“We are now at the beginning of what we hope will be more transportation options for folks to choose from. At some future date, the downtown will become 100% transit-oriented, when the VRE service is bi-directional and when increased bus service adds to the connectivity across more communities,” Mayor Jeanette Rishell said.

Two of the most notoriously congested commuter routes in Northern Virginia are taking steps toward enabling drivers to spend more time moving than stopping.

On Va. Route 28 in Manassas Park, a plan spearheaded by state Del. Danica Roem has received $24 million to begin construction of the first phase of a plan that will replace five current signalized intersections with Restricted Crossing U-Turns, or RCUTs, which reduce the number of conflict points where serious crashes can occur.

Fairfax County and the Virginia Department of Transportation have been widening its portion of Route 28, including the area where it intersects with Va. Route 29, near the continuing improvements on Interstate 66.

On Wednesday, ground will be broken to widen a one-and-a-half-mile stretch of Route 29 from four lanes to six, between Union Mill Road and Buckleys Gate Drive. The Route 29 widening construction aims to alleviate the twice-a-day backups at the intersection, which carries approximately 30,000 vehicles a day, according to VDOT.

Roem said the $24 million approved by the Commonwealth Transportation Board will cover the cost of design, engineering and construction of the first RCUT, which will be located at a still-to-finalized location between Manassas Drive and Spruce Street. It will also pay for raised medians and a contiguous sidewalk.

For decades, traffic has crept along Route 28, north of the historic section of Manassas.

“When you’re driving on Route 28 in Yorkshire and Manassas Park, you’ve got a ton of businesses, and even a couple of residential spots that are right along the road,” Roem said. “I mean, the mailboxes are right there,” next to traffic.

Unlike road projects in more remote locations, Roem said the traffic flow and safety improvements will not require much land acquisition and displacement of current owners: “Most of this project, we’re able to do within the existing right of way.”

Roem, who grew up in Prince William County, near Manassas Park, and campaigned on fixing Route 28 said securing full funding for the first portion of the RCUT project will help as she and local officials apply for construction money.

“The part of me that wanted this done six years ago is still, ‘God, I wish this was already done by now,'” said Roem.

Still, with ongoing construction on 28 in Fairfax and Prince William counties, Roem said there would be a downside to doing all of the improvements in a five-mile stretch of Route 28 in one swoop: “I can imagine my constituents would be really frustrated if construction went from New Braddock (in Fairfax County) all the way to Manassas Park.”

Roem expects to hold meetings by early fall with residents about the upcoming project after VDOT takes its next steps to implement the construction.

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