The Bully Coach and the Principal Enabler

Don McLean: A little too prescient.

There are a few songs in everyone’s life that speak to us in a particularly significant way. One such song for me was the Don McLean classic, “American Pie.” It was released at the perfect time for me—junior year of high school—and contained an intoxicating blend of catchy melodies and intriguing lyrics just begging to be deciphered. I remember sending away (there was no Internet, of course) for one critic’s interpretation, and being enraptured that pop culture could be used to critique pop culture (not the terms I’d have used at the time, of course). McLean himself wisely avoided commenting on what the song meant, supposedly quipping something along the lines of “it means I’ll never have to work again if I don’t want to.”

Anyway, when I read this story from Annandale, Virginia, about a football coach literally trying to throw the marching band off the field in the middle of their halftime show, part of the third verse of “American Pie” swarmed into my mind:

Now the halftime air was sweet perfume

While the sergeants played a marching tune

We all got up to dance

Oh, but we never got the chance

‘Cause the players tried to take the field

The marching band refused to yield…

I’m sure there’s a name for the linguistic phenomenon at play here: a literalizing of an expression meant to be figurative. I remember using this device, whatever it’s called, when I lit a production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood many years ago. There’s a song near the end of that musical that starts “I have read the writing on the wall”; we provided some actual writing on an actual wall for the title character to reference.

But I digress. What happened here was, at one level, simply the normal tensions between the jocks and the band, exacerbated by two things: 1). the football team finished the season at 1-9 (0-6 in conference) and the band is good (national award-winning good), and 2). the football coach is a moron of the first order. Of course, in one sense I could easily have included this story in yesterday’s piece about the real problem being administrators who don’t do their jobs. But there’s something about this business that makes me think it’s worth its own article.

I turn to someone who was there, Megan Ryan and James Barker, who wrote an editorial in the school newspaper. One or both of them seem to be band members, so that should be taken into account, but whereas some commentators have suggested that band members should “know their place,” I find no one who actually disputes the facts as enumerated here:

“GET THE DAMN BAND OFF THE FIELD,” a parent of one of the football players said at the AHS Marching Atoms “mid show” of their Senior Night performance on Nov. 8. 

The Annandale Atoms faced South County in their last game of the season. The night began as a typical Friday night football game in the fall would; cold and under the lights in Bolding Stadium but then turned sour for the marching atoms. In the beginning of the game, the band stood out in the cold weather, making a tunnel for all the seniors in the football team, dance team and cheerleading squad to walk through for their senior night. At halftime, all of the seniors were announced, the band started performing their show, “Music of the Night” with 7:36 left in the halftime period. As they played their first song, the football coaches brought their football teams back on the field to start to warm up for second half. At first, the teams stayed in the end zone, however, that changed when the band began performing their second piece, when both football teams entered the field by going past the goal line in the direction of the performing band students….

Then the unspeakable happened. Coach Mike Scott and a few other coaches as well as some players began yelling at the band and Band Director Adam Hilkert to “get the band off the field.” According to the game clock, we had about 4:30 left and halftime wasn’t over.

The screams from the fans and coaches became more intense, and Coach Scott resorted to his own measures by shaking the podium of junior Assistant Drum Major Douglas Nguyen, and then yelling at the other Assistant Drum Major, senior Noah Wolfenstein, to stop conducting and get off the field. Yells came from the stands and the coaches to the press box and the field.

If there’s any good that comes out of this story, it’s that high schoolers are learning research skills. Hence this:

Before the game, Principal [Vincent] Randazzo discussed with the referees that due to it being Annandale’s Senior Night, halftime might run over and that we needed extra time, and fortunately South County agreed to the time allotment during halftime.

And, more importantly, this:

According to the National Federation of Schools Football Rule Book, on page 19, rule number three says “As the teams leave the field [at the end of the first half], the timer places 20 minutes on the clock and upon reaching 0:00, places three additional minutes on the clock” to allow the football team to warm up for the second half.

The students muddy the waters by suggesting that the unsportsmanlike penalty if the band really did play too long would be “only 15 yards,” and, frankly, the reminders of the qualitative superiority of the band to the football team come off as a little smug.

But if, in fact, there were still four and a half minutes left on the halftime clock when Coach Scott started behaving like a particularly petulant 3-year-old (a 3-year-old losing 35-7 at the time, to be more precise); if, in fact, the referees and opposing coaches had signed off on a little extra time for Senior Night; if, in fact, the rule book actually says the three minute warm-up time can come after the halftime break (I think it does, [well, technically the case book does], but it’s incompetently written [go figure], so I’m not sure)… If all of these things are true, then there is no excuse for Scott to even be upset, let alone throw a temper tantrum. If he, in fact, shook the podium the assistant drum major was standing on, well, there’s a word for that: assault.

A reasonable response by the Principal, who had, at that night’s Band Senior Recognition Ceremony, told the band that they “[embody] what this school is all about,” would have been to suspend Scott for long enough to get his attention or, given that he appears to be no better a football coach than a person, fire him. That didn’t happen, of course, because: Football. ‘Murika. Freedom.

Instead, we get an open-letter apology six days after the fact, and an assurance that “Coach Scott has offered to apologize to the band members for his actions.” Of course, if the coach felt the slightest degree of contrition for behaving like a total jerk, he’d have apologized to the band, not offered to do so. But he’s a high school football coach in a school with a great history of gridiron prowess (two state championships under the previous coach). The fact that he’s 4-26 over the last three years doesn’t change his sense of entitlement in the slightest. Nor does the fact that it was Senior Night for the band, too, and that a lot of people in the stands came to see them, not the football team. He is, in short, a walking cliché. So, alas, is Principal Randazzo.

A Special Curmie Award: To the Tigers of Southern Columbia Area High School

As you know, Gentle Reader, the Curmie Award is presented to the educator who most embarrasses the profession. I make the nominations and you, collectively, decide on the recipient. One of the rules, however, is that the actions that get one nominated must take place within the last calendar year. But that would mean no award for the gaggle of jerkwads running the asylum at a place called Southern Columbia Area High School in Catawissa, Pennsylvania. This cannot be allowed to happen.

I therefore take it upon myself to bestow a Special Curmie on Principal James A. Becker, football coach Jim Roth, and the rest of the merry band of unethical incompetents at SCA, who are currently being sued for events that took place two and three years ago.

Here’s the story, and yes, I’m aware it sounds—to borrow a phrase from Stevie Nicks—hauntingly familiar to the saga of H.S. I wrote about some 14 months ago… except that this case might actually be a little worse. A cheerleader identified in court documents as “C.S.” was raped by two Southern Columbia athletes in July of 2009. Both boys were convicted: one (“A.Z.”) of indecent assault, the other (“K.D.”) of aggravated indecent assault, sexual assault, and indecent assault. K.D., in other words, was found “delinquent and dependent” on two violent felony counts. [By the way, it took me about two minutes to determine these guys’ names. I won’t include them here, but you can use the Google as well as I can.]

Ah, but did I mention that these guys are athletes, apparently pretty good ones by local standards? [Enjoy your notoriety now, you little bastards: not a lot of call for 5’10”, 160 pound basketball forwards at the next level.] Naturally, in the mindset of the sickos in charge of Southern Columbia, the success of the football and basketball teams ought to trump some mere female getting all hot and bothered about being forced to interact on a regular basis with the criminals who raped her. Boys will be boys, after all. There was precisely zero punishment for the boys.

On the other hand, the school ignored a court order to keep C.S. separated from her assailants, granted them permission to continue their participation in inter-scholastic sports, and even told her that if she didn’t want to be in the same class with her attackers, she’d have to drop out of honors English, because there was only one section. C.S. was de facto prevented from continuing as a cheerleader, since she’d have been forced to cheer for her attackers.

According to C.S., the school claimed (falsely) that they could do nothing without a court order because the assault took place off school property. I’m no lawyer, but I can identify the aroma of bullshit when I smell it. As C.S. claims in her lawsuit, the school put forward the:

… legally flawed position that no action could be taken absent a court order since the assault did not take place on school grounds. The School District took this position although it had a Title IX coordinator, its employees and agents had received Title IX training, and it specifically learned at this Title IX training that it could take action against student athletes who had committed a crime off school grounds.

An assistant football coach was in charge of class scheduling (convenient, yes?), and (deliberately? incompetently?) scheduled C.S. in the same study hall and same lunch period as the boys, despite a court order not to do so. The principal, football coach, and cheerleading coach (oh, so coincidentally the football coach’s wife) all went out of their way to testify not merely for A.Z. and K.D., but against C.S., and the boys were still convicted. When the school was finally forced to accede to the demand for reasonable academic accommodation for C.S., they opened another section of honors English for the two boys, having refused to do so for C.S.

As Katherine Redmond, the founder of the National Coalition Against Violent Athletes, writes:

As long as the administrators, who included a Title IX coordinator, were shielding the boys from any accountability while they racked up wins, that's all that mattered. The victim, who lost her entire high school experience, was not the issue to them. Ensuring the safety of other students was not their problem. Not if they could use the insulation of their small community to bully a teenage girl.

I could go on, but what’s the point? It’s clear that Principal Becker and his staff were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to accommodate a couple of kids who should have been thrown out of school altogether. Gentle Reader, you are no doubt aware that Curmie gets frustrated by schools that want to interfere with the judicial system. Kids get suspended for posting something on a private Facebook account that no rational adult could possibly construe as a threat. But if a student actually gets found guilty, by a court, of felony sexual assault against a classmate, well, there’s “nothing they can do.”

Horseshit.

There’s plenty they could do, but they didn’t. Why? Because they’re misogynistic jackasses? Because A.Z. and K.D. are jocks? Or from influential (a.k.a. rich) local families? Because Becker so covets a Curmie he’ll do anything to get one? Pick one… or more. The fact is, the picture at the top of this piece represents the only thing, and I do mean the only thing this school cares about.

I know, I know… I’m basing all this commentary just on what C.S. and her lawyer say. There’s another side to the story, no doubt. Trouble is, I doubt it. Too much of the case is demonstrable: the boys were convicted, they were allowed not merely to continue in school but to play sports, they were in the same classes. These allegations are too easily disproven if they’re not true; any lawyer with an IQ over room temperature would know not to pad the case with claims he couldn’t back up. Still, I suppose there may be a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this. If so, I stand ready to offer a retraction and an apology. Chances I’ll have to do that: roughly equal to the chances that the medal count at the upcoming Olympics will be dominated by Angola.

The lawsuit in question was actually filed several weeks ago, but I just became aware of it within the last 24 hours. Ironically—or perhaps not—two of the leading stories of the day tie in directly with the phenomena observed at Southern Columbia.

First (chronologically), there was the brouhaha engendered by the entirely unfunny “comedian” Daniel Tosh. True, there’s some dispute about exactly what transpired the other night, but whether “Breakfastcookie’s” account is entirely accurate or not, we end up at the same place for our present purposes. Does it matter whether Tosh introduced this apparently hilarious subject for a stand-up routine or if it was suggested by some jackass in the audience? The point is that someone, a male, no doubt, seems to find great hilarity in sexual assault. Big chuckles all around. Like Lindy West, whose commentary is the best I’ve read on the subject, I don’t proclaim that discussions of rape are inherently off-limits to comedians. But if you’re going to create a routine that’s actually funny to anyone above of the age of 14 (drunken frat boys excepted, as their mental age generally hovers at the border between single- and double-digits), you’d better not trivialize the experience of far too many women (and some men) in your audience. Context is all; Tosh certainly appears to be an insensitive boor… forgive me if I find my humor elsewhere.

The other, more major, story today concerns the release of the internal Penn State report on the Jerry Sandusky case by former FBI Director Louis Freeh. It shows, unsurprisingly, two things. First, there was a massive cover-up by not only former head football coach Joe Paterno and then-President Graham Spanier, but by a host of other minions, all more interested in protecting the reputation of the vaunted football program than of the dozen or more boys who suffered abuse at the hands of Jerry Sandusky after Penn State authorities knew exactly what he was up to.

Secondly, as even the not terribly bright guy on the sports radio show that came on while I was driving to lunch today could figure out, it was Paterno, not Spanier, who was really calling the shots. One of my dearest friends is now in the administration at Penn State—he went there long after Sandusky “retired” and before the… uh… fecal matter started flying. I don’t envy him the job of trying to restore credibility to an entire university tainted by the capitulation of the legitimate academic programming of an alleged institution of higher learning to an athletic program (specifically football in this case, but just as easily another sport) whose commitment to developing young adults was more a bumper-sticker aphorism than a statement of real conviction.

And so, we move an hour and a half east from State College, to where the six-time state champion football team means far more than the integrity of the school or the trivialized concerns of a rape victim, to where sexual assault is treated with good ol’ boy joviality, and to where I wouldn’t send a daughter of mine if I were held at gunpoint.

Southern Columbia seems more interested in being the Tigers than in being a school. To Principal Becker and everyone associated with the athletic program, especially the football coaches: enjoy your special Curmie. You truly are as embarrassing to the profession of education as it is possible to be. Congratulations, asshats.

The State Champion 2nd Base(wo)man

A little over a year ago, I wrote about the state championships in wrestling in the state of Iowa and the brouhaha that ensued when a boy defaulted a match rather than wrestle a girl. Now the sport and the state have changed, but we’re back at the same dilemma. This time, it’s baseball in Arizona.

Paige Sultzbach (shown at left) plays second base for the baseball team at Mesa Preparatory Academy. Her team went undefeated through the regular season and advanced to the state finals in the Arizona Charter Athletic Association, winning the crown when Our Lady of Sorrows of Phoenix forfeited the game rather than take the field against a team that included a female player. Predictably, there have been howls of outrage and derision from the Usual Suspects. One particularly strident voice is that of Lynne Maatz, director of public policy for that well-known high school athletics organization, the American Association of University Women: “The very idea that such stereotypes are so strong, they'd actually forfeit a game simply because a girl was on the field. That's ridiculous. Does she have cooties?”

Meanwhile, over at CraveOnline, the headline reads, “Sexist Arizona Private School Forfeits Championship.” You get the picture.

All that said, what ultimately happened is probably about as good as it’s going to get, at least in the short term. Mesa Prep won the title. Our Lady of Sorrows took what they believed to be a principled stand, based on the belief system of the Society of Saint Pius X, a group of priests who objected to the reforms of Vatican II and subsequently split from the mainstream Catholic Church.

Here’s their rationale for the forfeit:

This decision is pursuant to school policy which rules out participation in co-ed sports.

This policy is consistent with the traditional approach to education. As a Catholic school we promote the ideal of forming and educating boys and girls separately during the adolescent years, especially in physical education.

Our school aims to instill in our boys a profound respect for women and girls. Teaching our boys to treat ladies with deference, we choose not to place them in an athletic competition where proper boundaries can only be respected with difficulty.

Anachronistic? Yeah. Ridiculous? Maybe. And that’s the thing. The differences between this case and last year’s wrestling story are two-fold, and they cut in different directions. On the one hand, this is a private school and, as such, they get to set their own rules. Want your kid to be able to play for the state championship regardless of who’s on the other team? Send him somewhere else. It’s sad for the OLS players who might not agree with the policy, but they’re not there under duress. I’m no expert in Catholic education, but I’d be willing to bet that somewhere in a city the size and demographic profile of Phoenix, there’s even a Catholic school that thinks that “forming and educating boys and girls separately during the adolescent years, especially in physical education” has its limits.

On the other hand, this is baseball: not a contact sport (although of course there may occasionally be a tangle of players on a play at second base). Moreover, this was a decision made not by athletes themselves, but by someone else—either the school or the sacred brotherhood in charge. Indeed, it’s kind of difficult to find out anything about the school or how it’s run. Very few schools these days don’t have a website, but plug “Our Lady of Sorrows Phoenix” into a search engine, and all you find (other than a zillion stories about this fracas) is an appeal for money. No info on the school itself, no guiding principles statement, no “how to enroll.” Just a plea based on the rationale that “Whether you live in Phoenix or may someday visit, there will be a proper and beautiful traditional Catholic church for the benefit of your soul—and everyone else's.”

And whereas it may be true that recent events ultimately worked out about as well as could be expected under the circumstances, it’s also true that:

• Mesa Prep deserved the right to play for a title they’re now forever going to feel like they backed into.

• Sultzbach, who graciously sat out the two games with Our Lady of Sorrows during the regular season out of respect for her opponents’ beliefs (how many of us would have been so mature?) is well within her rights to want to play in the championship game, and, with only 11 players total, her team needs her.

• There is no girls’ softball team at Mesa Prep, so this is the only avenue available to Sultzbach if she wants to play a sport that employs a particular athletic skill set she seems to possess.

• Our Lady of Sorrows does seem to be mired in some previous century; their attitude is somewhere between quaint and patronizing.

• The players on the OLS team probably aren’t really thrilled, either: my guess is that they’d rather play against eight guys and a girl than not play for a state title.

There was an interesting interview on the ESPNW site with Mesa Prep coach Christopher Estilow. He says that the reason Paige hadn’t played in the two previous games against Our Lady of Sorrows was that “we played on their field, at their school”; he points out that the situation gave more playing time to the boys who had lost playing time because of her presence on the team. He saw it as an opportunity to improve as a team, while implicitly suggesting that of course his starting second baseman was going to play in the championship game.

Estilow is apparently new to his position, and didn’t find out about OLS’s policy until “a day or two before playing them in our first official game of the season.” Next year, Mesa Prep is moving to a different conference, joining the Arizona Interscholastic Association, so this may be a one-off problem, at least for a while… until someone else in the ACAA has a girl on the team or, hypothetically, until that conference approves an initiative by Our Lady of Sorrows athletic director Gerry Violette to keep the sexes segregated in athletics.

I just wrote that Our Lady of Sorrows has an absolute right to impose whatever rules it chooses on its own students, but then I deleted that sentence when I realized that isn’t true. They can’t order a firing squad to punish a kid for being late to algebra, for example. Where in the spectrum from the truly silly to the ethically fraught this particular manifestation of authoritarianism falls is, of course, a matter for debate.

What isn’t, is this: one of the traditional arguments for high school athletics is the preparation for the real competitive world to follow. Fifty years ago, that world may have been almost exclusively male. Today, no. It doesn’t strike me as too wild a flight of fancy that it probably does more good to have boys compete with girls than to enforce a separation that cannot endure outside carefully circumscribed parameters. Still, single-sex education isn’t an inherently outrageous idea, even if it does seem to be a bit too much of a throwback to an earlier and not necessarily enlightened time.

It may become increasingly difficult for OLS to schedule future games—any competitor would rather play than win by forfeit (which, of course, would be an easy strategy if all one wanted to do was to pad the won/lost record), and opposing schools aren’t likely to be willing to limit opportunities for their own girls just to get to play those one or two more games. But that’s a problem for the folks at Our Lady of Sorrows to deal with: down the road, it’s likely that they’ll need to conform, at least to the extent of allowing their teams to play against co-ed teams, or their athletic program will wither on the vine. Until then, however, their mid-20th century view of high school sports will make headlines only when there’s a Paige Sultzbach around. May there be many.

The Raised Fist and the Flying Flag

There’s a high school football story that’s getting a lot of attention of late. Facing Blue Hills in the 4A state championship game in Massachusetts (I refuse to call it the “Super Bowl”) this week, Cathedral High quarterback Matt Owens made what appeared to be a game-winning, or at least lead-changing, 56-yard run. But just inside the Blue Hills 25-yardline, with the ball tucked under his right arm, he raised his left hand over his head, taking two strides that way before finishing his jaunt into the endzone.

His little mini-demonstration, however, was enough to draw a penalty for taunting, nullifying the touchdown. The ball was placed at the spot of the foul; Owens threw an interception on the next play, and Cathedral never scored again, losing 16-12. Owens’s coach and father all-too-predictably whined.

Here’s the coach, Duane Sigsbury:

In the game being played, we won the game. Give Blue Hills a lot of credit. They are a great football team, but we deserve better. The game got taken away from us. If you’re going to take a game away from a kid being excited because he just made the play of his life, shame on you.

And here’s the father, Kenneth Owens:

He raised his hand because he knew was going to the pinnacle. There was nothing dishonorable about the play. There was no doubt it was a touchdown. He gets 20 yards in—and he's not thinking about the rule—and he just raised his hand. He handed the ball to the referee. He didn't spike it. He goes to a Catholic school where they are taught that their God is in the sky. So I know when he raised his hand, he was thanking his Lord for what happened to him today. Football is a team sport. There's lot of kids that are hurting today.

Assigner of officials Joe Cacciatore insisted that:

It’s tough, but the official absolutely made the right call according to the letter of the law. It says it right there in the rules that any attempt to draw attention to yourself, whether it is pointing the finger, raising a fist or anything like that, is a penalty. We’ve been instructed to call it when it happens, it’s zero tolerance now.

Don’t come to me looking for support for zero tolerance policies in general. But you know what? Sometimes they’re appropriate. Don’t tell that to sniveling sportswriters, like MSNBC’s Rick Chandler, however:

File this along with the first graders suspended for bringing a plastic knife to school to spread butter. Where’s our zero tolerance for blundering idiots? Taking common sense and individual judgement [sic.] out of the equation is never a good idea. And besides, if the player was actually praising God as his father claimed, he wasn’t calling attention to himself, now was he?

Where to begin? Let’s start here: it doesn’t matter whether the young man intended anything “dishonorable”; it matters what he did. Was he taunting? Not literally, perhaps, but the rule is pretty specific and pretty clear; it has been a point of emphasis among officiating crews all year, and players were specifically reminded of the rule immediately before the game. Moreover, while I’m not a mind-reader, I do make my living in part by relating gestural patterns to intentions. Young Owens may not have been intentionally taunting, but he sure as hell wasn’t praising God. One looks skyward to do that; Owens didn’t. One points with one’s index finger to God; Owens had a clenched fist. (One might also hope that there are more important things on God’s agenda than intervening in interscholastic athletic competitions.) Matt Owens was celebrating; end of discussion. Is that the same as taunting? It is according to the rulebook if it happens while the play is still underway. (Predictably, of course, only 14% of those responding to an online poll on the Boston Herald site agree with the call.)

Is it a stupid rule? Probably. I do understand the desire to curtail the narcissistic displays that have filtered down from the pros to the high school game. All that’s needed to cut that crap out, of course, is for television networks to cut away from the prima donna moments the way they used to do… and the way they agreed, for example, not to show the idiots who run onto a baseball field. Once pros don’t get airtime for being egocentric buffoons, the emphasis on maturity will find its way into the college and prep games, just as the puerile posturing has done for the past generation. Of course, that won’t happen, because television executives have the minds of 12-year-old boys. Still, there’s a difference between a spontaneous exuberance on the one hand and calculated, vainglorious indulgence on the other. Whereas the recent rule change helps referees in the sense that they no longer need to determine intent (just as a player accidentally grabbing a facemask will still get a personal foul call), it does allow a little less discretion.

Would I have called the penalty had I been that referee? Yes, although not making the call would also be defensible. Rules are rules, and this one doesn’t go away because some kid just made a great run. Indeed, it’s more important then than ever. But there’s a more significant point here.

A long time ago, I went to a Little League baseball game. My cousin Dick, two years older than I, was coaching, and his young son was on the team. The players were probably eight or nine years old. One of Dick’s young charges was called out on strikes. Returning to the bench, the boy complained that the pitch was really a ball. He was right: the pitch was outside and probably high, as well. Dick said, simply, “if you’ve got two strikes on you, and a pitch is close enough that the umpire might call it a strike, swing. We’ve talked about this.” And he patted the kid on the back and sent him out to play defense.

Dick’s wisdom in that moment has stuck with me for over 20 years. If you don’t want the officials to decide the game, don’t let them. Swing at close pitches with two strikes. Keep your stupid arm down when you’re about to score the go-ahead touchdown in the state championship game. Don’t let the referee make a judgment call against you when there’s no reason in the world not to obey the rules. Score the touchdown, then celebrate. Eight-year-old kids can wrap their heads around this concept. So can 18-year-olds, if we insist on it.

The referee, as far as I’m concerned, is blameless. Owens the younger did something dumb, but he’s a kid. I’m perfectly willing to believe he intended no disrespect to his opponents, but that of course doesn’t really change anything. Owens the elder, on the other hand, is an ignoramus. Your kid made a mistake. Stand by him. But don’t give us this line of crap about praising God. The penalty against your son was reasonable if not right. Shut up.

The biggest jackass, of course, is the coach. You’ve still got a chance to win this game if you keep your head. So, what are you going to call? Hint: maybe you don’t have your “visibly upset” quarterback throw the ball on a 1st down play when your line just opened a hole I could have run through for good yardage. You’re not only a petulant, unsportsmanlike ass, you’re also a moron. Shut up.

As for Rick Chandler: he, no doubt, gets paid to say snarky things on the internet. He is uncritical, unthinking, and unable to separate real justice from B-movie plots. He wants to know where is the zero tolerance policy for “blundering idiots.” Right here. Bye, Rick.

Cheerleading, Confucius, and the Courage of a Survivor.

I’ve taught in colleges and universities for over 30 years, 20 of them in tenured or tenure-track positions. I’ve had my share of athletes in my classes—ranging from an All-American middle-distance runner to guys who sat on the bench for an NAIA school’s basketball team. The majority of these young men and women were essentially indistinguishable from their classmates: some were likeable, some were good students, some both, some neither. A small but noteworthy percentage of them, of course, were living incarnations of the stereotypical stupid, pampered, arrogant, jock.

There was the (married) one who thought that whispering revoltingly explicit suggestions to the women (one in particular) in an acting class was acceptable; the one who came in to complain about his grade on a scene, alleging I had been unfair to him because he had nothing in common with the character, who happened to be a student complaining about his grade (I couldn’t make this stuff up); the one who dragged his position coach along with him to argue that I should have excused his absence the day he was in court, being convicted of an E felony—he also wrote neither of the required papers, got a D on one exam and didn’t show up for the other, and got a 38 (counting the curve) on the final… curiously enough, he failed my course, conference all-freshman team recognition notwithstanding).

There’s at least one of these creatures in the small town of Silsbee, Texas, about two hours south of where I live. His name is Rakheem Bolton (I can use his name because he was actually convicted), and he’s apparently a pretty good football and basketball player. He is also a rapist, or, to be legally precise, he was accused of rape and allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge. This is Texas, after all. Did I mention he’s a good athlete?

The case made headlines a few months ago, not because there’s another jock predator out there (that’s hardly worthy of mentioning), but because the victim in the case, a young woman identified publicly only as “H.S.,” got thrown off the cheerleading squad for refusing to cheer specifically for her attacker, by name. The cheer in question? “Two, four, six, eight, ten, come on, Rakheem, put it in." Seriously. Needless to say, the school did back flips to coddle their prize athlete, justice be damned. Tanner Hunt, Jr., the school’s attorney, sniveled that they had followed the law: “For all anyone knew, it was a girl mad at a boy.” He also proclaimed that “If there was something to apologize for, we would.”

I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t argue whether what the school did was legal. But I’m pretty sure of two things. One is actually incontrovertible: in a just universe, Tanner Hunt, Jr. would have his smarmy little face meet up with the business end of a baseball bat. And what I wrote in February about a different collection of jackass pseudo-educators in a different East Texas school applies pretty well to Silsbee superintendent Richard Bain, principal Gaye Lokey and cheerleading coach Sissy McInnis, all of whom bring dishonor to their town and their profession by valuing a rulebook over both people and justice. I described then my increasing admiration for the wisdom of the great Chinese sage Confucius:

One of the central tenets of Confucian thought is the avoidance of lengthy and complicated rules structures. Every situation is different, and one can never anticipate all the possible permutations. Confucius’s solution is not to try. He advocates placing authority in the hands of a junzi (gentleman) who is sufficiently endowed with both wisdom and ethical sensibility to be able to adjudicate disputes….

The idiot principal who pointed to the student handbook as if it had been divinely inspired, and who was unsurprisingly too cowardly to even face the press would have been lucky to have been laughed out of Confucius’s presence. More likely, we’d have found out the ancient Chinese word for “bitch-slap.”

Nice to know there’s consistency in the educational hierarchy, isn’t it?

The other point is less ontologically certain, but I strongly suspect that there were other legal means of handling the situation: suspending Bolton being an obvious solution. You know, punishing the criminal instead of the victim? There is no constitutional right to play basketball. I know laws are different in different states, but that high school in California I wrote about in February (February seems to have been a good month for stories about high schools) managed to suspend and ultimately expel an athlete accused of a sexual offense who ultimately wasn’t convicted of anything. If you can get thrown off the cheerleading squad for refusing to cheer for your rapist, shouldn’t… erm… being that rapist get you tossed from the basketball team?

I cannot improve on the commentary of Sports Illustrated’s Selena Roberts, “A school is supposed to be an emotional safe haven for all students, and educators should help, not harass, students in vulnerable positions…. Why not err on the side of compassion?” or of Jack Marshall on his Ethics Alarms blog, “This isn’t just bias, or sports mania. This is a black pit of an ethics vacuum, shared by a school, a culture and a community.”

The case is in the news again because the Supreme Court just refused to hear H.S.’s appeal, leaving the girl to pay $45,000 in costs for the school to defend a “frivolous” suit. I suspect that the law really is on the side of the school. What is legal and what is just are not interchangeable, as the ongoing saga of the Westboro Baptist Church continues to demonstrate. But if there’s anyone doing anything “frivolous” here, it sure as hell isn’t H.S. Unsurprisingly, Jack Marshall’s recent piece in the wake of that ruling hits the proverbial nail on the head: “As I find myself writing again and again, the law will sometimes support horribly unethical conduct, and an unlucky, courageous, abused young woman from Silsbee, Texas just learned this lesson the hard way. I’m so sorry.”

But that’s not where the story ends, I’m pleased to say. No, there isn’t going to be a reversal in legal terms. But a self-described “group of geeky women” in Los Angeles, one of whom I am proud to claim as a friend and former student, isn’t going to let H.S. be stuck with a $45,000 bill for doing what is right. Not if the League of Extraordinary Ladies has anything to say about it. They’ve taken up the cause, and they’ve already raised over $1200 towards their goal of paying off that $45K and hopefully having a little more to cover H.S.’s own legal expenses. (EDIT: there's now a separate website dedicated to the fundraising effort. I should also mention that the campaign is operating in cooperation with H.S.'s lawyer.)

As I said, I know one of these women, and if she says all the money is going to help H.S., you can count on it. And if they have their way, and I am certainly not going to bet against them, the lesson H.S. learns won’t be just that jocks can get away with anything, or that you can’t count on the legal system for justice. It will be that there is no shame in losing if you’re fighting for a good cause; that, idiot school administrators notwithstanding, people are more good than bad; and that if you show maturity beyond your years, exemplary courage, and a steadfastness of spirit, someone will have your back.

Talk, as they say, is cheap. This cause explicitly seeks “a large number of people donating a small amount,” even a dollar or two. The number of donors matters: symbolically, politically, and pragmatically. I made a contribution. If you can afford it, you should, too.

Two Stories about High School Wrestling

I came of age in a small city in upstate New York that produced more than its share of excellent high school wrestlers. Even in years when the team wasn’t outstanding, there were always a couple of individuals who were in contention for conference or even state honors. My wife was the statistician for a state championship team in Ohio. We lived for several years in eastern Iowa, where the tiny high school where my wife directed the plays after her day job produced not only multiple state titles, but more than one NCAA champion and Olympian.

So if high school wrestling has ever had a moment in the last generation when it attracted a national spotlight, I suspect we’d have paid more attention than would the average couple. Once in a while, there’s a story of marginal interest. I can’t ever recall a time when there were two significant stories happening at once. Now there are. Both have to do with the essential nature of the sport and the problems associated with, well, grabbing someone else.

The first story is from the great state of California, where the father of an unidentified freshman at Buchanan High is apparently suing the Clovis Unified School District over an incident last summer at wrestling practice in which a senior teammate allegedly rammed two fingers up the boy’s anus in a maneuver called the “butt-drag” (only the classiest of terminology for you, gentle reader). By the way, if you follow the links, you’ll find out the senior’s name, which figures prominently in virtually all of the reporting; on the chance that he’s innocent, I’m not going to actively contribute to the vilification of a minor. The freshman boy’s name has not been released because he is the alleged victim of a sex crime, but his father has made statements to the press and is identified by name in those stories: unless that father has multiple freshman sons on the wrestling team, I’m willing to bet that everyone at school has pretty well figured it out by now.

The alleged back-story in this case was that the senior was bullying the freshman over the younger boy’s water bottle. According to the New York Times (yes, they had an article on this case),

On July 15… according to the younger boy’s account, he refused to hand his water over, prompting threats from [the senior], including menacing gestures. The police report states that at a practice that evening, [the senior] purposefully stood near the younger boy during a wrestling exercise and, when the coach whistled for wrestling to begin, threw the younger boy down, pinned him to the mat and performed an invasive “butt drag” maneuver.

The senior claims the move consisted only of, and again I’m just quoting newspaper accounts, grabbing the freshman’s “butt cheek” in a move he’d been taught by a middle school coach. If the reporting of the Fresno Bee is to be believed, the incident took place in “a crowded gym during practice in front of parents and coaches.” Yet there appear to be no witnesses.

I’m not putting implicit faith in Jane Jamison of UNCOVERAGE.net, especially when her editorial piece is cross-linked to something called “Right-Wing News.” That said, I have seen no contradiction of the following:

The “victim,” a freshman, made no complaint about the move in practice, and in fact, was joking and having a good time and never even mentioned the incident, according to witnesses and the coach. It wasn’t until sometime later, that the younger wrestler said something to his step-mother and then to his father. The father is a former counselor for a local child-abuse agency.

The “victim” was taken to a doctor, who found slight redness in the victim’s anal area. The fingers, if they did go in or near the anus, were OVER the victim’s work-out clothes, it was not a “skin-on-skin” allegation.

Moreover, the “butt-drag” does indeed appear to be a standard wrestling move. It does not, by design, involve anal penetration of any description, but mistakes happen in sports. I was watching a basketball game last night, and an Oklahoma State player elbowed a Kansas player in the face. It was clear from the replay that there was no intent to do so; it was equally clear that the incident had indeed occurred.

It is impossible to conclude definitively what happened last July. According to an AP report, the older boy’s attorney asserts that a police investigation “found no evidence on the boy's underwear or gym shorts to support his account.” First off, there’s an investigation I’m glad I didn’t have to conduct. More to the point, the implicit suggestion here is that such a search would of necessity have been carried out very shortly after the incident itself, thereby calling into question the claim that the younger boy waited for a substantial period of time to file a complaint.

So we are faced with a wide range of possibilities. Perhaps the older boy actually threatened and then assaulted a younger, smaller teammate. Or the freshman (or his father) made the whole story up, whether for attention or hoping for a payout in a nuisance lawsuit or whatever. It’s also possible that there was an honest misinterpretation about the alleged threats, and/or that the anal penetration happened, but purely accidentally. Whatever the actual facts of the case, the senior was arrested on a charge of sexual battery (the charges were later dropped) and first suspended, then expelled, from school.

The school, of course, has one of those ridiculous “zero tolerance” policies, and I do wish I could blame it for the brouhaha. Unfortunately, I can’t. The question here isn’t whether a student ought to be suspended for getting highlights put in her hair. This allegation is indeed serious. If a bully committed a sexual assault on school property, of course he should be thrown out of school. The question isn’t whether the punishment meets the crime, it’s whether there was a crime.

The only people I’m confident aren’t at fault in this case are the school officials. Whereas one or the other of those boys is guilty of a crime, whether of assault (at least) or of filing a false report (at least), there is no allegation that I’ve seen suggesting the younger boy complained prior to the alleged incident that he was being bullied. The school apparently acted swiftly to suspend the older boy as soon as they heard of the allegation. That not all their decisions were unanimous suggests only that the facts of the case are open to more than one interpretation. All of which says that the younger boy’s father is an unethical ass for suing the school (but not the other boy?), whether his son’s claims are legitimate or not.

The other wrestling story is from Iowa, where a boy named Joel Northrup defaulted his class 3-A state tournament match rather than having to wrestle a girl, Cassy Herkelman of Cedar Falls. (It’s important that he defaulted rather than forfeited, as that allowed him to continue in the consolation round.) Northrup is home-schooled, but wrestles for Linn-Mar High School, just down the road from where we used to live. His rationale:

Wrestling is a combat sport and it can get violent at times. As a matter of conscience and my faith, I do not believe that it is appropriate for a boy to engage a girl in this manner. It is unfortunate that I have been placed in a situation not seen in most other high school sports in Iowa.

Whereas the California story is about two different versions of what happened, with little disagreement about what should happen if we could be sure of the facts, this one is about whether what everyone agrees happened should have. A lot of folks in Iowa and elsewhere gave young Northrup a lot of credit for making this very difficult decision, and indeed for being disappointed but not whining about circumstances. (There’s no lawsuit forthcoming here.) Others, of course, smirked that he was afraid of losing to a girl. Maybe. But I suspect not.

What I know for certain is that ESPN.com’s Rick Reilly is, as usual, full of crap. There was, needless to say, a vulturous swirl of reporters surrounding Herkelman, to the point where she “couldn’t get focused” and her coach took away her cell phone and denied her internet access in a vain attempt to allow her to concentrate on wrestling. All this, in Reilly’s world, is Northrup’s fault, apparently because jackasses like Reilly can’t be expected not to unnecessarily harass 14-year-old girls. It’s all the kid’s fault, because, you see, he didn’t say his unwillingness to grab a girl by the breasts or between the legs had something to do with sexuality or sexual mores. Bullshit. He’s 16, and apparently a devout (and probably somewhat cloistered) Christian. Of course it does, whether or not he may be a little embarrassed to cite it as a reason.

We’ll never know how many of the 20 boys Herkelman defeated on the mat were less aggressive than they would have been with a male opponent, were just that split-second later than they would otherwise have been to wrap up an opponent from behind, or hesitated ever so slightly before attempting to sling her to the mat, giving her just enough time to re-establish her balance. Or, conversely, whether they were so concerned about the possibility of losing to a girl that they were too aggressive, taking chances they otherwise wouldn’t have. Maybe—consummation devoutly to be wished—none of them did, and they’d certainly all deny it. But there will always be the suspicion. That said, the last thing I want to do is to suggest the Herkelman didn’t deserve her spot in the state tournament. Certainly treating Herkelman differently than any other competitor would be the truly insulting course of action.

Reilly, of course, presumes to lecture an adolescent boy on both ethics and religion: “Does any wrong-headed decision suddenly become right when defended with religious conviction? In this age, don't we know better? If my God told me to poke the elderly with sharp sticks, would that make it morally acceptable to others?” Reilly is, of course, too arrogant to notice that his flair for the hypothetical could readily be turned around. His entire argument is founded on the idea that Ms. Herkelman is entering into this competition willingly, knowing the risks. She’s 14, remember, too young to be responsible for other decisions regarding the mutual touching of boys and girls (the age of consent in Iowa is 16). But even if she were of age, would we be criticizing Northrup for not screwing her under the bleachers just because, hypothetically, she didn’t object?

Wrestling, unlike any other interscholastic sport, is specifically about grabbing the opponent, sometimes in what Reilly calls “awkward places.” That’s going to be more than a little weird for a fair number of adolescents if the opposition happens to be of the other sex. (Like puberty isn’t difficult enough already, right?) And it’s also one of few sports in which boys and girls compete against each other. There are separate teams in golf and track and tennis, none of which involve touching the opponent at all, but there aren’t enough girls to field a separate wrestling team, so we get co-ed competition in the sport that is in social (as opposed to athletic) terms the most problematic. And, especially at the lower weight classes, there will be some girls whose quickness and athleticism will overcome a relative deficit in upper-body strength. In other words, I’m not surprised that a girl could reach state at 112 pounds, although I doubt that a). it would happen at one of the higher weight classes, or b). she’d actually win the tournament.

I have no problem with Ms. Herkelman; with the authorities who allowed her to compete; with her father, who encouraged her to do so; or with the boys who decided to wrestle her. But neither of the two girls who qualified for the state tournament condemns Northrup. Nor does Herkelman’s father. Nor do I. No, that is left to the national sports reporter who just happened to be in the neighborhood. Because if he went to Cedar Falls intentionally, it would have to have been because he considers Herkelman unlike any other wrestler who went to state but didn’t win. And that would make him a raging hypocrite. Oh, wait… Rick Reilly… yeah, old news. Sorry.