Mississippi player kicked off team after wearing pink cleats

Rivals via Yahoo ^ | 11/11/10 | Cameron Smith

[Boogieman]

“I do understand and we don’t condone being disrespectful to the coaches,” Joey Sheppard, Coy’s father, told WLBT.com. “But he was standing up for what he thought was right. ...

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Then he should get to learn the lesson that, when you break the rules in order to make a principled stand on something you believe in, you should expect to have to face the consequences of the rules you broke. That makes the difference between an activist and a nincompoop.

[mmichaels1970]

Now the senior, who relied on academic credit from playing football to help fulfill graduation requirements, might not receive his diploma on time

WHOZAWAZA HUH? You can DO that now? And he relied on that credit to graduate? Sorry, that sentence really sidetracked me off of the main point.

[babble-on]

a lot of school districts have a phys ed requirement

[mmichaels1970]

a lot of school districts have a phys ed requirement

As does mine. But football counts? I always thought of it as an extracurricular. Do they get letter grades?

[The KG9 Kid]

In California back in the ‘80s, my high school had a certain Phys Ed credit requirement that every student had to complete. We also had a swimming competency demonstration that we had to pass before we could graduate. They finally ended that program, but that went back to the 1950s at least.

[Boogieman]

“Do they get letter grades?”

It would seem pretty silly to get a B- in football wouldn’t it? Maybe they just use pass/fail when they count sports for PE credits.

[earlJam]

Sounds like the coach is a jerk.

[mmichaels1970]

In Ohio, the kids still have to take one semester of phys ed to graduate and it is counted as a half-credit. But I’ve never heard of football or any other sports counting for it.

[mmichaels1970]

It would seem pretty silly to get a B- in football wouldn’t it?

Seems pretty silly to me to get a pass/fail in football as well. It's a team sport.

[jerry557]

Depends on the state and the school. Some give letter grades that might be based on attendance and participation. Or they might just give either an “S” or “U” stands for satisfactory or unsatisfactory.

Many base graduation on the certain number of credits. When I was in high school, we needed 24 credits to graduate. Math, Science, English, and Social Studies courses were required each year. The other two credits are electives. That would be 6 credits per year, for 4 years would equal 24 credits. If you fail a class or get kicked out, you have to make it up in summer school or risk falling behind your class.

[Vendome]

[dayglored]

> Then he should get to learn the lesson that, when you break the rules in order to make a principled stand on something you believe in, you should expect to have to face the consequences of the rules you broke. That makes the difference between an activist and a nincompoop.

Well said. Right on the money.

I support the young man's intention of taking a principled stand. But either he didn't think it through, or he is now seen to be a whiner (or perhaps his family's lawyer is).

[dayglored]

"He was standing up for what he thought was right."

Very good. However,...

[jerry557]

Well a legal problem the school might have is that they failed to establish and/or enforce a uniform code. Because other players on the team were wearing different color shoes and they didnt get kicked off.

If you are going to require your players to all wear black shoes, then you need to establish that policy and enforce it at the onset. And that’s what the judge is going to scold the school about, I guarantee it.

[The KG9 Kid]

If I recall, we had a certain amount of P.E. credits required for graduation that forced us to take P.E. every semester of our freshman and sophomore years. These credits had to be accumulated in total starting with your freshman year, so it guaranteed you'd have one P.E. class per day until you came back as a junior.

After that base requirement had been satisfied, all further P.E. credits were counted as 'elective' credits which were valued a lot less, unless you were on a sports team or in the marching band. 'Elective' credits were used for ceramics, art, singing, home-ec, and all the other non-academic classes. There was another requirement to take one year of a foreign language.

You couldn't just P.E. your way through high school in California back then, is what I mean. Only the University of California system allowed that. ;)

[mmichaels1970]

Depends on the state and the school.

Got it. In Ohio, you need to earn good grades and maintain an academic standard BEFORE you can participate in sports. If your grades drop, you become ineligible right then and there. Sports aren't a part of that same academic credit. Having been brought up in that sort of system, the idea of football players getting grades for playing football seems completely alien to me.

And even there, I might be able to see using football to satisfy a basic phys ed requirement. But if this guy is a senior, he's racking up an additional credit for every year he plays football.

Plus...he's a kicker.

[DesertSapper]

To hades with the rules! If you want to wear pink cleats, or pink hair, a pink football tutu, or you repaint the goal line pink . . . as long as it makes you feeeeel good.

Arrrrgh ... trying to understand liberal thinking makes my brain hurt.

[devane617]

I worked for IBM many years ago and had to wear a white shirt, and dark, matching slacks and coat. That was the rules. I could not make up my own as I went along.

[SlidingW]

He’s been reinstated. You can read “the rest of the story” at the Sun Herald (Biloxi/Gulfport).