5/15/2014
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Unchecked, Unchallenged and Unabashed
Is racism in high school sports being tolerated?
Central Dauphin East football standout Chase Edmonds was heading into the locker room after a game in State College when some fans in the student section began chanting: "Good luck in the playoffs, n-----."
Edmonds was a freshman. It was the first time he witnessed an act of racism in high school sports.
Robert Martin, a running back for Harrisburg High, said white opponents routinely hurl the N-word on the field as part of the cheap shots meant to unsettle players.
At a Christmas tournament in East Juniata a few years ago, Jennifer Tate-DeFreitas was as usual in the stands to cheer for daughter Malia and her teammates. She was stunned when two white men left the bleachers at the end of the previous game to return for Steel High’s game with their faces painted black.
Former Steelton athletic director Nicholas Conjar Jr. said one of the most brazen acts of racism he has witnessed happened just a few years ago during an away game against Cedar Cliff: Fans in the home crowd section, he said, substituted the proverbial “airball” basketball chant with the N-word.
Racial tension on the court or field is nothing new in U.S. sports. Across professional sports organizations, including the National Football League and FIFA, the international federation for professional soccer, the topic has garnered attention as officials and teams wrangle with the troubling undercurrents of racism. The latest on-field incident occurred April 27 during a pro soccer game in Spain, when a fan threw a banana at FC Barcelona's Dani Alves, a black Brazilian who plays fullback. Alves responded by peeling the banana and eating it on the field. Two days later, the NBA commissioner banned Clippers owner Donald Sterling for life and also fined him for making racist comments.
Indeed, these personal accounts of troubling racial incidents from student athletes, coaches, athletic directors and parents underscore what seems to be a broader and deeply rooted culture of racism in sports. Under the proverbial Friday night lights that shape so much of a young person’s high school experience, racism seems to be courting a foothold on the field and court — unchecked, unchallenged and unabashed.
“I can tell you racism is alive and well in the Mid-Penn Conference,” said Conjar, who is white. “Talk to anybody that coaches African-American players. Talk to anybody that takes a black team to an all-white school. It’s there. Even if you can’t hear it or see it, you can feel it.”
It is, said Harrisburg football coach Calvin Everett, the ugly side of high school sports no one wants to talk about.
“It is an issue. Whether it’s a big issue or a small issue, it’s an issue,” said Everett, who is black. “It’s something that needs to be addressed. Parents need to see it and read about it and talk to their kids. If it even stops one kid from doing it, I think it’s worth it. The whole racial thing, it’s not a cool thing. It’s not a cool way to try to get at your opponent.”
In the four years that he played football for Steelton, Lloyd Hill seldom allowed the racial slurs that were hurled about on the playing field to provoke him. (Photo by Joe Hermitt, PennLive staff)
Slurs and taunts: Hate on the playing field
Racial incidents on the high school sports court or field can be as subtle as the indescribable but palpable tension predominantly black teams say they experience when they travel to the home turfs of predominantly white teams.
“If you don’t work in a multi-racial atmosphere, you probably would not be aware of it, unless you were the person instigating it,” said Joe Chiodi, a veteran athletic director at York High. “People say things they don’t consider racist. It’s been a way of life. They were raised that way, and they don’t understand how it hurts at times.” (Chiodi is white.)
Sometimes, it’s not so much what is said but how it is said.
“When coaches say, ‘these kids’ or ‘get control of your kids,’ things like that, I personally think it’s racially motivated,” said Everett, who played for Harrisburg in the late 1990s.
“When they yell ‘get your kids, they are out of control,’ I take that as being racial, I just do. Whether it is or not, I think that’s a way of saying it without saying it. ‘Get your city kids out of here. Get your black kids out of here.’ I’ve heard that. That really set me off. I’m trying to get order among both teams, then you have coaches making statements like that.”
The racial intimidation also can be blatant and brazen — if not incredulous.
Black student athletes say that being called the N-word is part and parcel of participation in athletics. Black coaches tell stories of fans of predominantly white teams hurling racial insults at black student-athletes. Such incidents are not reserved to central Pennsylvania.
Warning: This video contains offensive language
In March, after a high school basketball game in Howell, Mich., several students celebrated the win of their all-white team over a black team by tweeting racist tainted jabs, including: “All hail white power. #HitlerIsMyDad."
In New Jersey, eight white Phillipsburg wrestlers in February were suspended from the state tournament after they posed for a photo in their school colors surrounding an effigy of a black rival hanging from a rope — a setup many say evoked a lynching.
A Friday night boys’ basketball game between two Pittsburgh-area rivals last year was marred when, at halftime, fans of the nearly all-white suburban school ran on the court in banana suits and made monkey noises to taunt the predominantly black rivals.
In the four years that he played football for Steelton, Lloyd Hill seldom allowed the racial slurs that were hurled about on the playing field to provoke him.
“I just shrugged it off. It’s part of the game,” said Hill, who graduates in May from St. Francis University in Loretto, Pa. “They are just trying to create a reaction. You don’t really take note of it. You just try to pay attention to the task at hand.”
In a game where bloody scrapes, torn ligaments and concussions are part of the competition, inappropriate language — and verbal racial assaults — have become commonplace.
“It gets very ugly down in the trenches,” said Edmonds, who will attend Fordham University in New York this fall. “It’s just football though. You look at the NFL. You can sometimes hear the guys when they are taking a hit and the microphone will pick up, and you can’t believe what’s being said. It’s football. That’s just how it is.”
The race card, at times, can be so overbearing that in a contest between a mostly white and mostly black school, players from the latter say they have to alter their game strategy. Excessive post-play high-fives in a game between two racially divided teams have to be toned down or, players say, they risk personal conduct penalties.
“If we’re playing State College or Mifflin, we go into the game already knowing you can’t be as intense,” Edmonds said. “You can’t even be as aggressive in a play. Maybe certain refs might let a holding call go … but you have to be much more disciplined and patient.”
Martin said it’s just another issue black student-athletes deal with.
“You can’t do anything about it,” he said. “Sometimes the refs, I think, have their mind made up before the game starts and who they want to win. You can tell by how they are officiating.”
Robert Martin, a running back for Harrisburg High, said white opponents routinely hurl the N-word on the field as part of the cheap shots meant to unsettle players. (Photo by Sean Simmers, PennLive staff)
Players say they often heed the warning of parents to be extra vigilant when they travel to what they describe as a “hostile environment.
“They would tell us be careful when you go to the bathroom, to go in twos, not to be alone,” recalled Malia Tate-DeFreitas, who helped the Rollers win a pair of state championships (2010-11 and 2011-12) and three District 3-A titles (2009-10, 2010-11 and 2012-13) as a four-year starter for Steel-High.
Coming from a community as diverse as Steelton, Tate-DeFreitas said the painted-black face incident at East Juniata stunned her.
“I know it made a couple of girls uncomfortable,” she said. “We never experience that coming from Steelton. That was a surprise.”
Matt Ortega, head football coach at Coatesville High, said the racism he and his players sometimes experience is no different than what he faced playing football for Steelton in the early 1990s.
“I’ve had to preach to kids that we have to be bigger and better, and we have to use that in a positive way to make us strive to be the best,” Ortega said. “It’s one of the things we learn to deal with. When you get kids to understand to use that as motivation, I think it works to our advantage.”
A 16-year coach, Ortega has lost his cool with officials for what he describes as blatant and unjust racial biases. Ortega said he even conducted a casual study of his own and found that penalties against his players tripled when the team plays out of its league. But all paled in the light of what he had to contend with early in the season.
In August, the Coatesville district superintendent and the high school athletic director resigned, after the community learned the two had exchanged offensive racist and sexist texts on their district phones. In a town whose racial and ethnic diversity mirrors that of Steelton, the incident threatened to unravel the morale of his team — not to mention the entire school.
“The kids were hurt,” Ortega said. “But in the end the kids are resilient. I think we’ve moved on. I think it’s the adults who aren’t able to let go. As a high school, we have moved on. I’m not saying we forgot, but we’ve moved on.”
A Matter of Spirit
The sportsmanship code of the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association is roughly a 43-page document that outlines rules of conduct for coaches, athletes, officials, cheerleaders, school officials and spectators, including members of the band, booster clubs and the media.
It outlines unacceptable behavior at sporting events, including disrespectful and derogatory cheers and chants that antagonize an opponent. The guidelines include instructions for school officials to impress on students that vulgar language and verbal harassment are prohibited.
The code contains no reference to racism or racially fueled behavior.
That’s because the rules of conduct and play in the guidelines define proper and improper behavior and language, said Robert Lombardi, executive director of the PIAA. Racially offensive language and behavior would fall under unsportsmanlike conduct, he said.
"If it’s happening, it needs to be stopped. Immediately," Lombardi said. "It cannot be tolerated."
Lombardi pointed out that before every high school contest -- no matter the sport -- officials gather with the head coaches and the team captains to reiterate the PIAA's parameters for appropriate and inappropriate conduct, which includes anything demeaning or disrespectful toward an opponent.
The PIAA's Lombardi said he has no tolerance for racism at the high school sports level. (Photo by Joe Hermitt, PennLive staff)
Lombardi said he has confidence that officials have imposed penalties to violators and even ejected individuals from games, both of which have happened across the state. Still, he said, racially fueled incidents are rare and isolated. When they happen, it’s a matter handled at the local school level.
“They are dealt with usually quickly and severely by the administrations," Lombardi said. "That’s a credit to those administrations."
Some say racially fueled behavior is a byproduct of the charged atmosphere at sporting events.
“We live in an environment where people get into a game situation [and] they have a tendency to lose control of common sense,” East Pennsboro Township athletic director James Hudson said. “You see it on television. You’ll see fans who just want to be a part of the game. … Obviously we, as a school, would not condone making fun of our kids or any other kids in any way.”
In a venue inflamed by school rivalries, the competitive desire to win, and frankly, teenagers at the cusp of young adulthood, inappropriate and hateful language has become a by-product of the heat of the moment.
“Sometimes emotions get out of control in a game, but once a slur is mentioned, it has a tendency to feed and grows like wildfire,” Mifflin County football coach George Miskinis said.
“I think it’s very inappropriate. Everybody has to realize that just because you pay the price for admittance, it doesn’t give you the right to demean or criticize or make slurs or put down an opponent whether it’s race, creed, or religion. It doesn’t matter.”
Bob Smetana, coach of Carlisle girls’ basketball, said that while he has never in his 15 years of coaching come across racially fueled assaults on any team, he knows racism spills into the high school sports arena.
“I think a lot of people take competition the wrong way,” he said. “It’s an emotional game. There’s no reason that what happens sometimes should happen, but a lot of time people get overwhelmed. People can’t control themselves.”
The onus, Miskinis said, is on game-management personnel to step in any time the PIAA sportsmanship code is violated in a high school sports event.
But students, coaches, athletic directors and parents said officials have not always extended a sensitive response to their concerns about racist incidents at games.
The issue surfaced in February, when a day after the Susquehanna Township girls’ basketball team lost a pivotal game to Red Land, the former team’s coach took to social media to report that her players had been the victims of racial slurs.
Julie Denniston is white, her team predominantly black, and the home team fan base mostly white.
Denniston’s post unleashed a frenzy on social media, as opinions of every shade ran amok, the vitriol spiked with more than just rivalry. The Red Land community insisted the incident never happened, while others lent credence to her claims with troubling stories of their own.
Denniston did not respond to requests for comment. She resigned her post in late April after coaching six years at the school. According to sources, Denniston is in line to take an assistant coaching position at Penn State-Harrisburg, a move that likely won’t be announced until later in the summer.
Conjar said that over the years he has lodged numerous complaints with officials against offensive racist language. The matter largely got “brushed under,” he said.
Few incidents have enraged Conjar more than the one he said happened this year during an away boys’ basketball game against East Pennsboro Township. Among the rally cheers from home fans were chants of “Get your fried chicken,” “Did you have watermelon for supper?” to the Steel-High team, a predominantly black squad.
In addition to bringing the matter to the attention of game officials that night, Conjar reported the racial chants to conference officials, as well as Hudson and the district superintendent.
“To my knowledge, nothing was addressed,” he said. “It seems to me I was the only guy upset. If I was the [athletic director] and I had fans who were chanting that, every one of them would have to go home. I’m sorry. It’s uncalled for.”
Hudson said he responded to Conjar’s concerns that night and had security ask the offenders to refrain from those chants.
“I still don’t know what the exact comment was that he found offensive,” Hudson said.
Hudson objected to Conjar characterizing the incident larger than it was.
“It was two students who made this comment,” he said. “It wasn’t the entire section. I was on other side of gym; I didn’t hear it. But it’s not a hostile environment.”
Parents say they were frustrated, at times, that officials and school administrators met the incidents they reported with indifference.
Jennifer Tate-DeFreitas said she was compelled to call police, when security at a game against East Pennsboro Township did nothing after she reported that home fans were racially taunting her daughter, Malia.
Two township police officers came out and wrote up a report, but left without doing anything. “When you have school authority watching and they don’t feel there is anything wrong with what is being said, it makes you feel like it’s acceptable,” she said.
Steel-High's Malia Tate-DeFreitas poses with her parents, Jennifer Tate-DeFreitas and Malik DeFreitas after she surpassed 3,000 points for her career. (Joe Hermitt, PennLive staff)
But even when conference officials have heard their grievances, coaches and athletic directors of predominantly black teams said they draw the short end of the stick in a controversy involving a white team.
Former Steelton head football coach Tom Hailey said firsthand experience confirmed what he long suspected.
Early this season, in a game against Susquenita, Hailey said an opponent who had been calling his player the N-word provoked one of his players. Just before halftime, with Steelton leading 26-0, the two players threw punches. An on-field scuffle between the two quickly got out of hand, when a third Susquenita player jumped in, prompting a melee. Other players got involved, as coaches and officials tried to order everyone back to their respective benches.
The incident lasted less than a minute, but officials stopped the game, and both schools were tagged with forfeit losses. Accounts of the incident went viral on social media, overwhelmingly, the majority of them pointing the finger at Steelton.
Hailey said that for him, the most disappointing part about the experience was the meeting with District 3 officials, a meeting he said was billed as an effort to be transparent and present what really happened on the field.
The fact that his team was saddled with suspensions and a forfeit was hardest of all, knowing, he said, that his player had been provoked by repeated racial slurs.
“It’s that stigma that really bothered me,” Hailey said. “It was portrayed unfairly, but that stigma is out there. People cross their arms and say, ‘See, I told you.’ And that’s not fair to our kids, our staff or the school. But there are certain things you can control, like staying onside and making a block. There are certain things in life you can’t control, so what can you do?”
The PIAA's Lombardi said he has no tolerance for racism at the high school sports level.
“I’m very disappointed for the simple reason that there’s an avenue for this to be addressed," he said. "Students can tell coaches, coaches can go to the athletic administration, the athletic administration can go to game management or the administration of the school to deal with this swiftly. This is not acceptable in contests, period.”
Fred Isopi, executive director of the Mid-Penn Conference, conceded that with some 30 schools in the conference, officials have little recourse if no one lodges a complaint or report with his board. The same applies if a school or coach goes outside of the chain of command in airing grievances about an incident, he said.
“How can something be done when nothing is officially reported?” Isopi asked.
For the most part, he said, the conference board, which comprises athletic directors and superintendents, has conducted no major investigation into racial intimidation, although he said it has had “conversations” with schools. The issues, he said, have been resolved at the schools level.
“You can’t go on a rumor,” Isopi said. “It has to go through official channels. If there are isolated incidents, I’m not aware of it. We’ve not had anything brought to our board members from schools, individuals or administrations indicating there has been anything in this area.”
Players like Malia Tate-DeFreitas say they often heed the warning of parents to be extra vigilant when they travel to what they describe as a “hostile environment." “They would tell us be careful when you go to the bathroom, to go in twos, not to be alone.” (Photo by Sean Simmers, PennLive staff)
Offenders number just a few
The outrage over allegations of racially fueled intimidation at the Red Land-Susquehanna Township game this past season diminished in a matter of weeks. In its wake, another high school playoff season proceeded as normal, although the incident had thrust the age-old debate of racism in sports back into the forefront.
In the days following Denniston’s post, claiming her girls had been verbally assaulted with racial slurs, Red Land girls’ basketball head coach Andy Bell was stunned that his team’s home community was at the center of such racial intimidation allegations.
Bell, who insists neither he, his players nor parents present at the game against Susquehanna Township heard anything racial being yelled down at the court, conceded that boys’ basketball games tend to be far more aggressive than the girls' in terms of trash talk that is exchanged not only on the court but hurled from bleachers down to the court.
Bell, who has coached at the high school level for 18 years, said parents routinely call officials to the attention of a player from the opposing team they feel deserves a whistle, but that he has never thought the emotionally laden orders were racially laced.
“I can understand how someone could perceive them to be racially motivated,” said Bell, a sociology teacher. “But there’s a big difference between someone making an assumption of what is being said vs. what’s actually been said. There’s big leap that takes place there.”
In the social media frenzy that followed the game, Red Land was portrayed as a white bastion of racists.
“I think there’s a stereotype of Red Land being a rural community,” Bell said. “I laugh at that. I grew up in Juniata County where there are more cows than people. Everyone has stereotypes and that’s one people have of Red Land.”
Arrion Sorrell, the only black player on Red Land’s team, refuted the suggestion that her community is racist. A track runner as well, Sorrell said she has never experienced or witnessed any racial incidents, either directed at her or opponents.
“I always hear about it,” Sorrell said. “I’m not going to say there isn’t racism in sports but I never experienced it myself. There is racism everywhere.”
For all the testimonials that racially intimidating acts and language are part of the high school sports arena, black student-athletes say the offenders are almost always a rare few outliers. The majority of opponents, as well as the opponent’s communities, are welcoming and embrace the spirit of inclusion and sportsmanship, they say.
“It’s never like the whole team,” Edmonds said. “It’s usually one or two or small groups.”
Martin said he had his reasons for his willingness to look past it.
“Some of them don’t act like that outside of football, so you really can’t judge it as a real impression,” he said. “If you know how they are on the field and you know they are just a running-their-mouth type of person on the field and not a good athlete that shows respect to other athletes, you put that stuff aside. But when you see them outside of football, you try not to associate yourself with people like that.”
Ortega, too, refused to cast everyone in the same light.
“I‘ve worked with some great people over the years who were not at all racist,” he said. “But you also know there’s still a certain degree that still exist. It goes back to the way people have been raised, the way their grandparents were raised. I think a little of that lingers.”
Having assumed his role as athletic director at Cedar Cliff, John Kosydar said he could not answer to allegations of racial incidents that might have occurred before his arrival.
Kosydar, however, noted that one of the first things he did in November when he arrived at the school was to articulate his expectations for a strict code of conduct and principles from coaches and players.
The pursuit of victory, Kosydar said, should be based on honor and six core values: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship.
“I like to tell them that every single decision that you make should go back to those six core values,” said Kosydar, who is white. “What I’m after here is really developing character in the athlete. I feel they should guide every action that coaches and athletes take.”
Kosydar has even extended his dialogue on sportsmanlike conduct to the student section at the school — known as the Golden Corral.
Kosydar keeps the names and numbers for the leaders of the student cheer section in case he ever has to contact them to raise concerns about inappropriate behavior or cheers.
“If I’m embarrassed to bring my sons to the game, something is wrong,” he said. “This should be a family atmosphere. We try to promote that."
“I can tell you racism is alive and well in the Mid-Penn Conference,” said former Steelton athletic director Nicholas Conjar Jr. (Photo by Sean Simmers, PennLive staff)
For the love of the sport
In his freshman game against State College, Chase Edmonds remembers a fight breaking out, provoked by incendiary slurs issued from some of the CD East players.
But most of the time, black student-athletes just shrug it off.
“It really doesn’t get to me,” said Robert Martin, running back for Harrisburg High. “I’m there to play the game. I know they are trying to get in my head, and I don’t let it happen.”
That’s not to say it doesn’t register.
Lloyd Hill, a 401-pound former all-conference tackler for Steelton, said he is immune to taunts about his size. Racial slurs is another matter.
“Trash-talking is part of sports. That comes with the territory -- but not racial slurs," he said. "I wasn’t brought up that way. That’s not how I was taught to play the game.”
The silence and indifference, former Steelton athletic director Nicholas Conjar Jr. said, is criminal.
“It’s a disservice to the kids that they would have to hear that sometime along the way,” he said. “There’s supposed to be no color in the huddle. I’m not black, but I can’t imagine what that would’ve been like and then I have to play a ball game?”
Longtime Harrisburg coach Kirk Smallwood said that while these experiences might be painful, they are a part of life, a mirror of society.
“It’s woven into the life of society,” said Smallwood, who is black. “There will be situations and they will have to make decisions as to how they react. My job is to teach, shape, mold and nurture young men and women on how to behave and act. But when they are in that kind of situation, against that kind of venom, I can’t teach them how to react. I’m not qualified to do that.”
Everett said it’s his hope and dream that racism will cease to be a factor in any arena in American society.
“It would always be great to not have to worry about hearing my kids say so and so just called me a ... whatever. It would be great to have not have worry about that,” he said.
“It takes a lot for me to tell my kids just ignore them, don’t worry about it. Just ignore it. It takes a lot for me tell them. It takes them a lot to listen to what I’m telling them to do.”
Edmonds said he takes a small measure of comfort in his confidence that while racism likely will never be eradicated, future generations will continue to erode at the dividing lines.
“People are going to be people,” he said. “They are going to lie, cheat. They are going to hate. They are going to steal. That’s just how they’re brought up. You are not born hating somebody. You are taught … but I think that as time goes on, it will be more eradicated. Maybe by the time I have kids, I feel it won’t be much of a problem. It won’t be forgotten but it won’t be as much of a problem.”
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