Some kids that are good kids
We’re told that (US) football builds character. Maybe it does for some, but for many it builds a taste for violence and a sense of entitlement, to put it politely.
Five high school football stars in Pennsylvania have been cited after allegedly beating numerous animals to death and posing with their bodies.
The five teens are facing fines for illegally killing wild animals and then posting a picture with their kills on Instagram, according to WNEP.
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The five area football players posing with baseball bats and dead animals: a snake, raccoon, frogs, opossums, and pigeons.
Not cute. Not funny. Not good clean fun.
The teens were cited and face fines. Four of the five cited were members of Southern Columbia’s state championship football team who graduated earlier this month.
Blake Marks, Austin Knepp, Gabe Delbo, and Nick Becker helped led the Southern Columbia Tigers To a state title in the fall.
Becker was WNEP’s Offensive Dream Team Player of the Year. Marks was also on the Dream Team.
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Jim Roth, the head football coach at Southern Columbia, said, “Some kids that are good kids … made a bad decision.”
He added that “Some of these kids are not even aware of all the laws as far as small animals.”
The issue isn’t just the laws, the issue is cruelty. The coach doesn’t sound like a very thoughtful guy himself.
::fume:: These are not good kids. These are future rapists.
So clubbing a bunch of animals to death is “a bad decision.” It’s just one bad decision. A single mistake. Could happen to anyone.
Such casual sociopathy… and you’ve got a dude excusing it, really? On top of that they’re too dumb not to post it on Instagram.
By what measure are they good kids? Oh right, good at sportsball therefore to be protected.
C’mon it was just a few minutes of ‘action’.
Funny, I read a story about a woman who was gang raped by football players 20 years ago. Their coach said almost exactly the same thing. At he least he realised he was wrong eventually and has made amends.
Wonder if this one ever will. As for the buys, they’re just broken.
Cruelty to animals is one sign of sociopathy. I wonder what else these “boys” have done.
‘Bad decisions’ and ‘bad choices.’ My other favorite is ‘I/he got in with a bad crowd.’
These are obviously not ‘good kids.’ Football culture selects large, fast, violent boys and showers them with privilege and approval. Shelters them from moral and legal consequences. Successful participation in American high-school football should be a red flag to any future employer or school.
And the alcohol question looms, as it always seems to.
This sounds like another version of “boys will be boys”. If this is what it means to be boys, I wish the hell they would stop.
When I was taking a tour in the Wichita Mountains once, the ranger was telling us a story of walking up the path one morning and meeting a group of boys coming down from spending the night on the mountain (perfectly legal). They were carrying a pail of dead bats they had bashed on the head for fun (not legal). Their parents were stuck with a stiff fine. I hope they made the kids pay them back.
Holy shit, this happened right in the tiny spot where my dad’s whole side of the family lives; one of my cousins graduated from Southern Columbia a few weeks ago, so she was in the same class as these guys. Sadly, this really doesn’t surprise me coming out of that area, since hunting and drinking are probably the two most popular pastimes there.
Here is a reference to the story I mentioned @6.
The coaches words were “really good guys who made a bad choice.”