Matt Labrum believes football helps create great men.
And it is that belief and his passion for the game that led the Union High School head football coach and his staff to suspend all 80 players from the team because of off-field problems ranging from cyberbullying to skipping classes.
We felt like everything was going in a direction that we didnt want our young men going, said Labrum, an alumnus of the program hes coached for the past two years. We felt like we needed to make a stand.
So the coach and his staff gathered the team together after Friday night's loss to Judge Memorial Catholic High School and told them he was concerned about some of the players' actions and behavior off the field. He then instructed them all to turn in their jerseys and their equipment. There would be no football until they earned the privilege to play.
The coaches told them there would be a 7 a.m. meeting the next day where they would have an opportunity to re-earn a spot on the team.
We looked at it as a chance to say, Hey, we need to focus on some other things that are more important than winning a football game, Labrum said. We got an emotional response from the boys. I think it really meant something to them, which was nice to see that it does mean something. There was none of them that fought us on it.
Cyberbullying
One incident in particular moved the coaches to action. A few days before, guidance counselors informed the coaches about a student who believed he was being harassed and bullied by football players on an anonymous online chat program called ask.fm something Labrum and his staff had never heard of before last week. Because the social media website allows users to hurl insults from behind a screen name, there was no way for coaches or counselors to know who was harassing the young man, who is not a member of the football team.
We said, Weve got to make a change, said Labrum, who met with the student who was bullied on Monday to offer an apology. We were pretty open with (the players) about what wed heard. We dont want that represented in our program.
Whoever it is (doing the bullying), we want to help get them back on the right path.
But there were other issues that concerned the coaches, including failing and skipping classes and showing disrespect to teachers.
It had gotten to a new level, said Labrum. We felt like we werent respecting the teachers, what they were trying to do inside the school, other peoples time. Overall, our program wasnt going where we wanted it to go. We werent reaching the young men like we wanted to reach them.
