BROOKLYN, Ohio – An Ohio high school football coach resigned Monday after his team used racist and antisemitic language to call out plays during a game last week.
Brooklyn High School coach Tim McFarland and his players repeatedly used the word “Nazi” as a playcall in a game against Beachwood High School. Beachwood, a Cleveland suburb, is roughly 90% Jewish, according to the latest survey, published in 2011, by the Jewish Federation of Cleveland.
The Brooklyn team stopped using the term in the second half of the game after Beachwood threatened to pull its players from the field, according to a statement from Beachwood Schools Superintendent Robert Hardis. However, several Brooklyn players continued to direct racial slurs at Beachwood players during the game, the statement read.
McFarland handed in his notice of resignation Monday morning. Brooklyn Schools Superintendent Ted Caleris said in a statement that McFarland “expresses his deepest regret” and that he and the school apologize for “hurtful and harmful speech” that will “not be tolerated.”
Caleris also stated that Brooklyn High School has been contacted by the Anti-Defamation League of Ohio and hopes to use the organization as a resource going forward from the incident.
Hardis confirmed in a statement that the two school districts are in close contact and that Brooklyn has been “appropriately concerned and apologetic.”
“This is not the first time Beachwood student-athletes have been subjected to antisemitic and racist speech,” Hardis also said. “We always hope it will be the last.”
The statements did not mention disciplinary action toward the players involved.
Antisemitism in the United States has risen significantly in recent years, with no signs of declining, according to a study by Tel Aviv University’s Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League. From 2021 to 2022, the number of antisemitic incidents rose by 35%.
This sounds like a bunch of kids that thought it would be cool to yell things they shouldn’t and a coach that let them do it, more so than a team that’s actually super racist.
Your description sounds to me like a team that’s actually super racist, but I disagree with you.
They used “Nazi” as a playcall against a team consisting primarily of Jewish kids. That means that, even if it was a student’s idea, the coaches knew about it beforehand, approved the idea, and shared the call with all of the players. And that’s the most generous possible assumption. Every player on the field in the play needs to know what the playcall means. It’s not just something people shout out in the middle of a game. More likely it came from the coaches, but you’re right that we don’t know that for sure.
Either way, the adults should have known better.
“They were just pretending to be racist and antisemitic”
Yeah, that makes it better…
It’s not about pretending to be racist. It’s about understanding that high school kids don’t understand racism beyond a surface level. Yelling bad thing gets them angry, is probably as far as most the team understood it. Writing off the team as just racist ass holes is just going to push them that way.
They’re teenagers, not toddlers, they knew the significance of what they were doing, otherwise they wouldn’t have done it. And how does calling them out push them to become racist?
When I was was a teenager, I sure understood what racism was. You didn’t?
Teenagers thinking they are edgy and real racists are two different sets of people. Most Teenagers grow out of it.
A good way to get them to understand that that shit is not funny is to punish them for it. Maybe make all of them do reports in the Holocaust and/or visit a synagogue.
Also, it’s generally the coaching staff that makes the play calls.
If it happened once, you’d be right. Sometimes kids have the wrong idea of what is appropriate, and when they err it’s important to set them straight immediately.
But doing that for most of the half? Yeah, that coach knew it. And we shouldn’t let the fact that they’re kids let any of them “it’s just a joke, bro” out of it.
I think you may be right if the kids were younger.
My father was in the RAF in WWII. He was literally bombed by the Germans.
We moved to the States when I was six and I started school here in 1969. In second or third grade some friends and I learned how to draw swastikas. We sorta maybe knew they were the emblem of the German military, but beyond that we were ignorant. I got out my crayons and drew them in many colors all over my school notebook.
I took that notebook home to show my parents this cool thing I had learned. Neither of them said a thing, but my mother bought me a brand new notebook.
I look back on that with so much shame. Even without knowing the depth of meaning to that symbol, I had not put together that this was the symbol of a military that had done its best to kill my father, his family, and had succeeded in killing thousands and thousands of his countrymen.
Now, knowing full-well what that symbol means, the shame is deeper.
All that said, I was eight or nine so my ignorance might be excusable. I’m unsure that it is for high schoolers.
I think the biggest thing isn’t even your age. It’s that when you realized it was wrong and why, you changed. These kids obviously knew better because the school had received this type of bullying before and the kids keep using hate speech after being told not to.
The Jewish school has been on the receiving end multiple times, nothing says that the other school has had incidents like this beyond this game.
I wonder if you’d have the same opinion if the opposing team was black and the team in question were shouting plays using KKK or confederate shit.
They clearly are a racist team, considering the article explicitly states that players kept being racist little shits after they stopped using the Nazi call:
However, several Brooklyn players continued to direct racial slurs at Beachwood players during the game, the statement read.
Clearly those players just wanted to have fun saying inappropriate things and are just trying to be inflammatory /s
I find it hard to believe every player was ok with it. How many kids do you think were told “No, no, no, we are calling Not Z. Using Nazi would be wrong.”
I still think they should end the season for the whole team as a way to say this crap is inconceivable.
If they are not OK with it and didn’t do anything to stop it from being a call used in a game them they are complicit.
I hear what you’re saying, and were it a college or professional team I probably would agree, but for high schoolers that’s harder. At that age, their very identity and self-worth are dependent on peer acceptance. Not to mention any shy kids who might have felt powerless to speak up. We also don’t know that they didn’t try; one or some may have tried and been shut down by peer pressure. My guess is one idiot thought it’d be funny, convinced a few more, and pressured the rest. “It’s just a prank bro” or somesuch.
That the coach didn’t put an immediate stop to it is definitely an issue.
How do we know they didn’t try anything to stop it? They might have raised objections to the coach and got shot down. If you aren’t the coach or a majority voice, you have no power to actually change the call being used.
I find it hard to believe every player was ok with it. How many kids do you think were told “No, no, no, we are calling Not Z. Using Nazi would be wrong.”
I’m not sure, but I’d have to think that if the kids were told that and believed it, theyre either super incurious or not very bright. I would think that even the slowest among us that isn’t a shit head would be able to see that ‘not z’ and ‘nazi’ are too close to use without being misunderstood and assumed to be a shit head by using that.
