Ugh. The response by the head coach and his laywer…just ugh.
They claim the coach offered the player chicken nuggets as an alternative when he said he couldn’t eat pork; the student’s family’s lawyer contests that*. So maybe the coach wasn’t trying to be a bigot.
But…he was still forcing a teenager to overeat as a punishment, which is fairly awful by itself. And he was inflicting that punishment for missing a “voluntary” workout. And neither he nor his lawyer appear to be contesting those parts of the accusations. At best he’s a power-tripping bully who shouldn’t be allowed to coach ever again. It’s clear he’s learned nothing from this experience and regrets nothing.
Ugh.
*Hebrew Israelites are also apparently often vegan. There’s no indication I’ve seen whether the student in this story tries to keep vegan or only avoids pork, but if he’s vegan, the chicken nuggets could have been worse from his point of view than the pizza with the pepperoni picked off. And even if he’s not vegan, chicken nuggets could have violated some other element of his faith’s dietary restrictions.
Vis-à-vis forcing the young man to violate his religious principles, it’s interesting to note that one coach was cleared and kept his job: Badre El Bardawil. Whom I presume, from his name, is a Muslim. Which makes me wonder just what his role was, if he realized just how offensive eating pork would be to the player and maybe tried to hold the other coaches back? No way to know, obviously, but his name struck me when I read the article posted by @PastTense.
(Another hit for the name was a real estate listing where he bought a $190,000 house a month ago, so whatever god he follows, I bet he is thanking him that he still has a job.)
Quite possibly, but I wouldn’t necessarily assume that without more info. There are Christian Bardawils in Lebanon and a pretty sizeable Lebanese diaspora in the United States.
All this nitpicking over whether there was anti-semitic intent kinda seems like a distraction from the point that a school authority figure being allowed to literally torture a child isn’t and shouldn’t be acceptable behavior.
How is that a “distraction”? There was a digression on “win at all costs” culture in high school sports, and a short one on the background of one of the assistant coaches, but I think literally every post on whether there was anti-Semitic intent included condemnations of the coaches’ behavior. I was the main poster “nitpicking” whether there was anti-Semitic intent, and I’m pretty sure I condemned the coaches’ actions in every single one of my posts. Literally no one in this thread has contended what the coaches did should be acceptable behavior. We all agree it was awful. What we’re discussing is points we don’t agree on while also condemning the coaches’ behavior.
Many parents don’t want their kids playing football in large part because of CTE, and interestingly, it’s the fathers who are most likely to prohibit their kids from signing up.
Yeah, but in so many schools, the football team are considered demigods even if it’s a losing team, and hoo boy, is it a letdown when they graduate and nobody cares any more.
Besides, if they were punishing the kid for skipping the voluntary meeting but showing up for the pizza, a more reasonable scenario would have been to make him run some laps or sit and watch the rest of the team devour their slices while he gets nothing – assuming there were some he could have eaten.
On the face of it, they were trying to humiliate him. Whether they were anti-Semitic or just plain dumb they should not have a positionof authority over anyone less than college age, if then.