I’m a football player, and I love this sport, playing next to my teammates and friends. While I love winning, I know that the other team loves winning too. I also love this sport because it lets me develop new skills, learn discipline, and stay active. And if you haven’t been on the field listening to our student section cheer for you–it’s amazing.
Picture the scene: it’s the biggest football game of the season: Harrison vs. East Central on August 25th. The student body and football players were full of enthusiasm after a week designed to get their excitement to a fever pitch. East Central tee shirts had been ripped apart, and the students and athletes were hungry to beat their rivals.
It’s finally Friday night, and players come back onto the field after halftime following an intense 2nd quarter. The game goes on and 3rd quarter starts. East Central starts it off with a running play as their wide receiver makes a gain of 20 yards, but is stopped by two of our players. After the stop of the run, they stand over top of the fallen East Central player.
This is what causes the fight.
Other East Central teammates ran to pick up the fallen athlete, and they pushed the Harrison players away. That’s when our team engaged, and the fight only lasted a few seconds before the coaches broke it up.
Even though it was so quick, standing on the sidelines, it felt much longer to me. A lot has been said about the fight. Harrison got a lot of heat online about what happened. As a football player on the field alongside my teammates and while watching the game from the sidelines, I think this situation wasn’t that bad.
I only disliked when our players stood over the East Central athlete and taunted him. That was unnecessary, and in addition to the hard tackle towards EC’s run play aggressively being stopped, the taunting inflamed the situation.
As student athletes, sportsmanship has to come before winning. We have core values at our school, and we need to reflect Trust, Respect, Ownership, and Leadership on and off the field.
As a player I understand aggressive tackling, it’s part of the game, but taunting may have led to them getting inflamed.
