Similarly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the teachers saw a black kid who won’t eat pork for religious reasons, and thought “Muslim.”
Possibly. We had two distinct teams for JV and Varsity when I was in high school and then we added a Freshmen team my senior year because we had something like 200 kids out for football (out of ~270 boys in my high school). I know out head football coach was on staff and the D coordinator was a teacher as was the wide receivers coach but everyone else else I believe were volunteers. I know my O line coach was a pastor for some local church and had nothing to do with the school outside of football. I had a friend take a year off college due to some family issues and while he was home he was a coach at my high school so I know there were a ton a volunteers.
I’m not sure we’ve seen enough to know this is true. This team could focus on obedience and conformity at the extent of winning such that they were willing to drive off their star player and probably cost wins so their team could be more homogeneous.
And that is what I think some people may find annoying. We have a situation where bigotry is the most likely explanation. Every time that happens, there’s always someone who has to come in and remind us that it might not be bigotry. There’s always this need to look at the smoke of bigotry and try to prove that there’s not a fire.
It seems unlikely to me that the guy’s religion would not have been known by the coaches, or that his dietary restrictions wouldn’t have come up before. It seems unlikely that they happened to stumble upon the exact same bigoted attack that is often used against people with religious dietary restrictions: forcing them to eat food that is forbidden. Heck, the food in question is specifically pork, the one that everyone uses to attack Muslims and Jewish people. It’s also likely that these people don’t know the difference between this guy’s religion and actual Judaism, as such had to explained even here. Antisemitism is not sure, but likely. But the rest? It screams bigotry.
The things I don’t get: If you agree they’re assholes and being abusive, why the need to show that they might not be bigoted? What’s the point? It’s not like their actions become any better if it wasn’t bigoted. So what’s the point of making a big deal out of whether or not it was?
You may be open to the idea that this is still motivated by bigotry, but you still seem to prefer the non-bigoted argument. And that I think it was is frustrating.
I’m not trying to start a fight here or insult anyone, BTW. I’m actually more responding to your apparent confusion in why people are responding to you as they are. I suspect that this may be the reason, based on what I’ve read and my own personal experience.
I think people get tired of the need for conjecture about how something could be not actually be motivated by bigotry every time something apparently bigoted shows up. It seems to defy the “if there’s smoke, there’s fire” or the “it if quacks like a duck” aphorisms.
I know I do.
It’s not just this news article that informs my opinion on the school and its focus on winning. And it’s not just their football team. Their basketball team is driven hard too, as well as other sports programs.
When I went to the state tournament basketball games, they were almost always there. The only won a couple of times, and unless I go and dig through the programs (assuming that I can find them), I couldn’t tell you exactly how many times they were there, but over the 20 years that I attended the games, they were a very familiar name.
I assume that there would be an understanding of that prior to the person enlisting. And if the US military disciplined a Jewish soldier by forcing him or her to violate Kosher rules I guarantee that it would be a firestorm if that got out.
Now you are substituting the action of winning with being primarily focused on winning. They could be focused on having fun and still win multiple state championships. You are saying that because they win they only care about winning and trying to use this example as further proof they only care about winning. Winning is a by product most of the time and the focus is elsewhere.
FWIW, if you google the phrase “academic and athletic liaison”, you get one hit from someone’s LinkedIn who listed that as a volunteer position on the golf team when she was an undergrad, another LinkedIn listing where it’s somebody’s goal to have that position, along with a lot of stuff I absolutely don’t understand, and every other result is for coach Wattley.
No, I am not. You need to be focused on winning to win multiple state championships. This is a public school. They are not recruiting or trading players, they are working with what they have, the same as other public high schools. Most of the schools that have that many multiple state titles are private schools that offer athletic scholarships, which is its own controversial issue, IMO. Most schools occasionally just get a really talented class that make it to state, and maybe even win it, but only the schools that focus on athletics make it to state as often as they do.
First, that’s not what I am saying. I am saying that the athletics department focuses on winning. That’s not the same as what you have errantly claimed that I said.
But, in any case, they didn’t accidently win, they did it on purpose. How do you think that happened, if you are saying that their focus is on having fun?
Apparently the focus is on humiliating a player and forcing them to violate their religious beliefs.
Anyway, I don’t know that this is productive, as you are simply putting words in my mouth, and then declaring victory at claiming to have defeated them. My focus here is on having an interesting conversation about the toxic nature of athletics where success is measured by winning, and your focus seems to be winning an internet argument.
If you’re annoyed by my posts, I frankly think that’s your problem, not mine.
Except, if the whole point of the punishment is to force him to eat pork, why allow him to pick off the pork and some of the cheese that had been in contact with it and not eat it? Again, I’m not saying there wasn’t religious bigotry involved, but it’s a lot less clear cut to me than it is to many in this thread.
And this is the thing I don’t get. Someone starts a thread slamming someone for aggravated mopery. Several posters chime in to agree how aggravated the mopery was. Someone else pops in to say, “I agree it’s mopery, and that’s bad, but I’m not seeing the aggravated part.” And then gets pushback from other posters for defending mopery.
I really don’t understand what’s hard to understand about agreeing what the coaches did was abusive, but disagreeing about how clear cut it is that anti-Semitism was involved. And here’s the other thing: anti-Semitism is a Bad Thing. But that means it actually makes a difference whether someone actually did something anti-Semitic.
What you seem to be saying here is that anytime anyone accuses anyone of bigotry, it’s wrong for anyone else to disagree. I happen to disagree with that.
And by the way, aphorisms are, y’know, aphorisms, not rules of evidence. Plus, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, all that glitters is not gold, and first impressions can be misleading.
I don’t know anything about Israel Hebrew’s specific dietary conventions, but I know that it’s not kosher if pork has touched it at all.
It would be a bit like telling you to eat a pizza that had shit all over it, but you could pick off the shit and the cheese that you could see shit on.
Bigotry comes from ignorance as well. If the coaches insisted that picking the sausage off was enough to satisfy the athlete’s dietary restrictions, when the athlete protested that it was not, then they are violating his religious beliefs.
You felt liscnese to make up a dramatization, so here’s a counter to yours.
“I can’t eat this, it has pork on it.”
“Then pick off the pork.”
“The pork has still touched the pizza, I can’t eat it.”
“Then pick off the cheese that it touched.”
“It has still touched it. I can’t eat it.”
“Stop whining and eat the damn pizza!”
There are lots of ways public school develop a history of success. In some cases it’s because parents will move into a district so their child can go the the school that has athletic success. This school has a history of getting kids ready to play professional football. Parents move to get their kids into school districts that have better academic programs why wouldn’t them move to get access to better athletic programs
Winning is fun. It is very hard to have fun getting your shit kicked in 10 games a year in fact most people will tell you that’s the opposite of fun.
You are putting words in my mouth. I actually said that it seems the focus of their program could be:
Which can lead to winning or it can lead to doing horrific shit to your best player who leaves the team and you don’t win.
It sure seems that way which is counter productive to winning unless you think this is going to help them win more?
I think your fixated on some bullshit that in order to win you have to sacrifice all else to the God of winning. It’s not true and even measuring success by winning has nothing to do with the act of winning. You could measure success by the amount of time your team smiles each week and still have a winning football team.
Winning is a by product of inate tallent, luck, and preparation. Especially at the high school level instead tallent is a crap shoot and obviously luck comes and goes. Where most good coaches focus is on preparation once you have figured out a way to get the most out of your players through preparation you tend to find that they had more inate tallent than other people thought and you tend to get luckier.
Now these jackasses seem to think that conformity and abuse is what causes players to have the best preparation which is ludacris since you don’t see shit like this a great football schools like De La Salle or Mater dei. That isn’t a function of winning though and probably is to its detriment.
I actually agree with all of that.
I don’t think that’s so much a “counter” to my dramatization as it is a pretty close paraphrase.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what others are saying in this thread. I’m pretty sure others are misunderstanding me.
There is speculation upthread that the student was required to eat pepperoni pizza, specifically, precisely because it would violate his beliefs, and that being forced to violate his religious beliefs was in and of itself the punishment. Which, as I’ve said, doesn’t really seem to make sense when by the student’s own account he was allowed to pick off the pepperoni and some of the cheese. If the whole point was to force him to eat pork, why not just, y’know, force him to eat pork, instead of forcing him into a technical violation?
All I’m saying is that it’s not at all clear to me that the punishment was motivated by anti-Semitism or that the punishment was intended to be anti-Semitic in form.
At this point, though, I think I’ve said my piece as well as I can. And, frankly, I really don’t want to argue anymore about whether some bullies were intentionally anti-Semitic or accidentally created the appearance of anti-Semitism or something in between.
I don’t want to just claim the last word, either, so of course anyone that wants to further counter my arguments is perfectly welcome to do so. But I probably won’t be participating in this thread anymore.
This is a fair point, I’ll admit. The fact that this school district focusses on winning is a draw for parents who want their children to go into professional sports, just as a district that focuses on academics is a school that parents will move into if they want their kids to go to a good college.
It’s a good point as to why they, as a public school, win lots of tournaments. But it entirely undercuts your claim that their focus is not on winning.
Nah, I had fun in little league soccer and baseball. We lost nearly all our games, but we enjoyed ourselves doing it.
If I had measured success or fun as needing to win, then I probably wouldn’t have had as much fun.
Were these your words?
How’d I manage to get those words into your mouth?
Not all things are as productive as people think they will be. Do you think that the coaches humiliated this player and violated his religious beliefs in order to lose? No, they did it because they thought it would help them to win. That it backfired on them doesn’t change their motivation.
I’m reminded of working at a particular fast food restaurant, when in order to make more money, they decided to cut labor. Sales decreased far more than the labor that they saved. Does the fact that the result of their decision was counterproductive negate the motive behind that decision?
No, I am stating that these coaches are fixated on some bullshit that in order to win they have to sacrifice all else, and I am stating that these coaches are willing to make that sacrifice in order to win.
That was the entirety of the statement that you seemed to take issue with, that defining success as winning has no place in high school sports.
You could, but you probably wouldn’t.
Which is why a team that consistently winning over the years is not one that is relying on luck, they are relying on a focus on winning.
This is most likely true. However, we are talking about the coaches at McKinley High, not good coaches.
I don’t know much about their programs, but I doubt you know all that much that goes on behind the scenes either.
But, the fact that they are a historically winning team implies that something that the coaches are doing is a function of winning.
I don’t think either that it was specifically motivated by anti-semitism, I think it was motivated by toxic bullies getting off on a power trip and abusing those left in their charge. They knew very well that they were forcing him to violate his religious beliefs. The fact that they forced someone to violate the religious beliefs that they themselves think to be unnecessary does not mean that they were acting with an intent to be anti-semitic, but that was just adjacent to them acting as shitty human beings and bigots. I’m sure that if they were in a position to force a practicing Hindu to eat a hamburger, they would have done so as well, and there’s nothing anti-semitic about that.
Not too far from where I live we had a high school embroiled in a major scandal due to their focus on winning and their willingness to cheat in order to do so.
They had 11 state titles in 15 years. They were clearly very successful. But to accomplish that, they had to use dirty tactics including the following…
The KingCo Conference report, released earlier this week, said that while players were illegally recruited to play for Bellevue, some used false addresses to be eligible within Bellevue’s residential district. Other families allegedly acquired apartments within the school’s boundaries, with the rent being paid by boosters. More of the money went to pay for school; the kind with no real academics. According to the findings, 17 players were funneled to a for-profit private school for extra classes and academic help. The Academic Institute existed in a strip mall not far from Bellevue High. For a paltry $1,750 tuition per month , these student athletes supposedly got academic help. However, the school often had no teachers in the classrooms; little, if any homework was ever given, and the players received full class credit. And that lofty tuition bill? Discretely paid for by the booster club. Some prominent college football players are named in the report as having been cycled through The Academic Institute. And then there is the claim within the report that some of the misdeeds were not so secretive; they were just direct cash payments to families to get players to Bellevue.
Even if you ignore the fact that they were able to get the best players by bribing their families and lying about residency requirements (giving an unfair advantage over schools following the rules), they also got the kids school credit for taking sham classes, shielding them from the need to “waste time” with any real academic pursuits and robbing them of a legitimate high school education. It must seem awesome to the students but they suffered for it. There’s a reason why students are normally required to maintain decent grades; it is to prevent the exact situation that Bellevue put those kids into, where football became the only thing they learned how to do.
From 2007
Stockton high school brings in 14 “students” from American Samoa to play football.
Fraud ensues.
Local sports authorities announced Tuesday a string of punishments for a Stockton high school football program accused of improperly recruiting student athletes from American Samoa.
Franklin High School will have to forfeit 19 victories for the past three seasons and will be banned from competing in the playoffs for the next four years, a regional commissioner of the California Interscholastic Federation said.
The penalties are the final step in a six-month probe alleging that a Samoa-based relative of an assistant football coach paid the students’ parents to send their sons from the remote South Pacific territory to arid Stockton to play sports.
Fourteen students and their families flew to California on tickets purchased by the coach’s mother and stayed in motels paid for by Franklin High School personnel, authorities said. The coaches then helped the parents get fake utility bills to establish their sons’ residency, and the new recruits advanced the Yellowjackets’ standing within the league, officials said.
So that article that says that the head football coach hired a running backs coach and a wide receivers coach, which mentions that the running backs coach is actually switching positions with the C-team coach, makes you think there are three coaches.
The article mentions four coaches by name and position:
Head coach
Running backs coach
Wide receivers coach
C-team coach
That is pretty obviously not a complete list and it already has more coaches on it than your guess.
Here’s a team picture of the varsity squad from a couple yeas ago. There’s at least 12 coaches pictured and that’s just varsity.
https://palmettomustangs.org/2016/08/22/2016-2017-varsity-football/
No doubt you’ve seen the “demotivational” posters at despair.com.
They used to have one showing a crowd of track runners rounding a curve on the track. The caption was: “For every winner, there are a dozen losers. Odds are you’re one of them.”
Are they all exclusively varsity coaches, though? At my high school, the head coaches of the eight-grade and “B” (junior varsity) teams were also assistant coaches on the varsity team.