Posted on 11/11/2010 12:47:19 PM PST by jerry557
In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, October was all about the color pink, even in sports. MLB players wore pink wristbands. NFL teams wore pink wristbands and pink-edged hats, and in some cases, pink cleats. Everywhere you looked, pink was in vogue.
Evidently Mendenhall (Miss.) High School football coach Chris Peterson missed the memo.
According to the Associated Press, WLBT.com and USA Today, among other outlets, Peterson kicked 17-year-old placekicker Coy Sheppard, above, off the Mendenhall football team when Sheppard attempted to wear pink cleats in a practice following a game in October. As Sheppard explains in the video above, courtesy of WLBT.com, coaches ridiculed the kicker for wearing the shoes during the prior game, but he showed up for the team's Monday practice wearing the pink cleats regardless. Now the senior, who relied on academic credit from playing football to help fulfill graduation requirements, might not receive his diploma on time.
That inspired the player to file a lawsuit against the Simpson County School District, whose deputy superintendent, Tom Duncan, insisted that Sheppard was kicked off the team for failing to follow his coaches' instructions, not for the color of the shoes.
"It had absolutely nothing to do with lack of support for breast cancer awareness," Duncan told USA Today.
Yet the color of the shoes did have everything to do with breast cancer awareness. The cleats were a gift from Sheppard's 82-year-old great grandmother, a breast cancer survivor. Sheppard wore the cleats to honor her and his mother, also a breast cancer survivor.
"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. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at rivals.yahoo.com ...
I wonder what pays more, IBM or high school football player?
rules are rules
in life we may not always be able to make our own
he should have been kicked off the team
Ah, that pic is so ‘80s.
Anyway, I first saw the headline about the pink cleats on Yahoo. Is it just me, or do they have a disproportionate amount of stories about high school football on there?
I also noticed that Yahoo’s news headlines tend to have an extreme pro-DNC slant.
>>> 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.
So what RULE did he break? All I see in the story is the coach “ridiculed” the color pink in a prior game.
There obviously was no hard and fast “rule” about color of shoes. Coach was just being an ass. From the story, “He’s had five or six different colored shoes throughout his last two years of kicking for Mendenhall and when he got the pink shoes that’s when it became an issue. I think it is the pink shoes.”
When some mouth breather mouths off, does that now constitute an enforceable “rule” ? If the report the student has already been reinstated so quickly is correct, the school sees this too.
That makes the difference between an coach and a nincompoop.
“So what RULE did he break?”
Don’t disobey the coach, maybe?
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