When Matt Labrum, the head football coach of Union High School in Roosevelt, Utah--roughly two hours east of Provo--found out that some of his players were cyberbullying another student, he took what can charitably be described as a drastic step--but in light of recent events, it's a laudable one. He suspended his entire team.
Labrum had been getting reports all season that his players had been mouthy to teachers, as well as skipping and failing classes at a pretty high rate. Dealing with that sort of thing goes with the territory of being a high school coach. But just before Friday night's game against Salt Lake Judge Memorial Catholic, he found out something that made him realize things were going too far.
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, ‘We’ve 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 we’d heard. We don’t want that represented in our program. … Whoever it is (doing the bullying), we want to help get them back on the right path.”
The hammer came down after the game. Labrum gathered all 41 varsity and JV players together and ordered them to turn in their jerseys and equipment. According to one player, Labrum had told them that the team was disbanded--meaning he was prepared to forfeit the remainder of the season if he didn't feel the players had earned their jerseys back.
At a 7 am meeting the next morning, Labrum stripped his captains of their positions and ordered elections for new captains; only two of the old ones were reelected. He then handed his players a letter telling them what they needed to do to earn their way back onto the team by the following Wednesday--when preparations were slated to resume for the homecoming game against Emery High from Castle Dale. KSL-TV in Salt Lake City obtained a copy. Read part 1 here and part 2 here. Instead of practicing, the players spent Monday digging up weeds and cleaning, then spent Tuesday at the local senior center. After a two-hour study hall on Wednesday, the players learned that all but nine of them had earned their jerseys back. Those that didn't had met "85 to 90 percent" of the criteria required to get back on the team. All of this had the full support of the school's administration, as well as the players' parents.
A few weeks ago, this would have seemed like a pretty extreme step. It could have been solved by asking the captains to ferret out the cyberbullies and turn them in. But earlier this month, Rebecca Sedwick jumped to her death after having to endure over a year of bullying both at school and online. Seen in that light, this move, heavy-handed as it was, was probably the only way to get the message through to the players. By the time Labrum and his staff had been able to find out who the culprits were, the victim could have been seriously hurt or worse.
Labrum's been bombarded with support from all over the country, but there's no such thing as too much given the circumstances. Drop him an email at mlabrum at dcsd dot org.