Highschooll Football Coach Takes Bullying by The Horns

Harding High’s football team, the Hornets, had placed first in the regional competition for three years running. The athletes on the team were the acknowledged kings of campus, and a spot on the cheering squad was coveted by most of the girls in the school. At the end of the last season, the Harding High team had been involved in an incident in which two freshman boys were surrounded, humiliated and stuffed into an equipment bag.

The two boys made the trip back to school in the baggage compartment of the bus, tied into the equipment bags. As a result of this incident, five members of the varsity team were suspended for a week. When they returned to school, they were lauded as martyrs by their classmates.

Tom Andrews, coach of the Hornets, hadn’t been aware of bullying and hazing by the members of the team. The incident made him realize that there was something very wrong in the messages that the football players were getting. Concerned, he called for a meeting of all secondary school sports coaches in the city and their principals.

At the meeting, he presented a speaker who talked about ways that sports teams can make a positive difference in a school, and that coaches can make a positive difference in its members’ lives. Before the end of the meeting, each of the coaches had agreed to participate in an experiment to eliminate bullying and encourage positive behavior in their team members.

To evaluate the effect of the program, each principal conducted a survey of bullying in their schools. Among the commitments made by the coaches were:

• to attend a one-day symposium and training on anti-bullying tactics

• to make participation in a community project a condition of remaining on the team

• to openly speak out against violence against women, racial bullying, sexism and discrimination based on perceived sexual orientation

• to immediately intervene in any situation that looked like bullying

• to talk openly with the team members about societal attitudes and promoting good values

Coach Andrews announced at his first practice that one of the conditions of remaining on the team this year was participating in a community service. He’d arranged for the football team to prepare and serve dinner at a local shelter for the homeless once a month. When they protested, he stood firm, and when one of the linebackers refused to take part, he was suspended from the team. The following week, the boy joined the team at the homeless shelter and took his place.

In addition, Andrews instituted a system of points. Each time that he saw a member of the team engaging in pro-social behavior, he publicly acknowledged their effort, pointed out the good in it, and awarded points for it. When Joe, the first string quarterback, spotted two boys taunting another in the hallway and told them to ‘knock it off, you two.

How would you like it if we were doing that to you?’, Andrews awarded him 10 points. When he learned that two of the boys on the team had spent a Saturday afternoon teaching a 7 year old at the homeless shelter how to throw a football, he praised them lavishly for their action, and awarded them each 25 points.

Throughout the season, he enforced his teams’ consequences for bullying behaviors. Players who used derogatory language in reference to another student were fined $1 per word that went into a fund for buying ice cream for kids at the homeless shelter. The first week, the kids had several gallons of ice cream in several flavors. By the end of the season, the boys on the team were contributing from their own pockets in order to make up the difference because there were so few fines being collected.

At the end of the season, in addition to the usual Most Valuable Player awards, Andrews gave out certificates of completion to each of his players who had participated in community service, and special awards to those that had garnered the most Pro Points. Every member of the team who had at least 100 Pro Points was invited to attend a formal dinner dance, paid for by the Parent Teacher Organization.

At the end of the year, the principals conducted a second school bullying assessment. The results showed a significant increase in positive feelings of safety at school among the students and a decrease in bullying behaviors throughout the student body.