Decision stirs racial tensions
In what youth football officials are calling a crisis, five suburban Pop Warner teams have voted to leave a conference filled with urban teams, including those from Mattapan, Dorchester, and Roxbury, roiling racial tensions in what is supposed to be a fun activity for 7- to-14-year-olds.
Led by the Needham-Wellesley Eagles, teams from Natick, Weymouth, Framingham, and Norwood told Pop Warner officials they were leaving the Bay State Conference because they wanted to play more suburban teams.
In interviews, team officials cited ”intimidating” rap music played at some city games, city teams’ brand of hard-hitting football, and the safety of some city playing fields. Last summer, 11-year-old Jenry Gonzalez was shot in the chest during a Pop Warner practice in a Roxbury park.
Boston coaches say the suburban teams’ departures are nothing more than thinly veiled racial prejudice and that suburban team officials did not try hard enough to talk things out before leaving.
”You can sugar-coat it, but I call it like I see it. I think it’s racist,” Dorchester Eagles president Kenny Williams said. ” ‘Black kids hit our kids harder, black kids listen to rap music’ — it doesn’t make any sense to me.”
The allegations of prejudice are flying both ways.
In a letter obtained by the Globe, Needham-Wellesley officials contend that a Boston coach getting off a bus at their football field egged on his players by saying, ”Let’s go get some white [expletive]!” They also said a black coach from Boston called one of their players, who is Haitian, a ”traitor.”
”We had to leave because our concerns weren’t being met with any serious considerations,” said Mike Libertini, vice president of the Needham-Wellesley Pop Warner organization, which is establishing a conference with other suburban teams in another league run by American Youth Football.
For their part, coaches from city teams say that racially charged comments by them or their players are not tolerated. If anyone made them, they say, they no longer have their positions.
The withdrawals have left the now nine-team Pop Warner conference with only one suburban team, Walpole, and an official there says it is considering withdrawing from the conference as well. Pop Warner officials had an emergency meeting last week and have scheduled another for Thursday to discuss the problem.
It is perhaps the most contentious chapter in a saga that has played out over more than a decade. Since the first mostly nonwhite city team joined the Bay State Conference almost 12 years ago, predominantly white suburban teams have been leaving.
The first was Hingham. When the Boston Raiders of Roxbury joined, Hingham team officials said they did not want to travel to the city, conference officials say. Over the years, as teams from Dorchester, Mission Hill, Mattapan, and the South End joined the conference, officials say, teams from Scituate, Randolph, Dedham, and Braintree left. The exodus last month was the biggest to date.
”I’ve got a really bad feeling,” Paul Alconada, president of the Bay State Conference for the past 19 years, said. ”I could lose the whole conference.”
Pop Warner Little Scholars is a youth football and cheerleading organization founded in 1929 that prides itself on building character and focusing on academic achievement and positive athletic experiences in the approximately 360,000 young people involved in 41 states and several countries, according to the Pop Warner website. Each team has a board of directors that votes on management decisions, including fund-raising, coaching, and policies.
Board members from Needham-Wellesley decided in April that they were fed up with Pop Warner management of the Bay State Conference, which they said allowed inappropriate, frequently racial, comments by Boston teams to go unpunished. They also complained that Boston teams have tryouts, prohibited under Pop Warner rules, and that they practice year-round, another violation of the rules, which allow practices only from August to December.
”Nobody was following the rules,” Libertini said.
They voted to leave the conference May 9. The next day, Libertini said, the Needham-Wellesley board invited other suburban teams to a meeting about American Youth Football. And one by one, they all followed Needham-Wellesley’s lead, save Walpole. The Walpole Crusaders are meeting this month to discuss the issue.
”It is under consideration at this point in time,” said vice president Gary Whittemore, who added that tensions fueling the split have been building for several years. Whittemore would only say that some of the teams leaving were concerned about safety.
New England regional director Al Perillo said some suburban parents see drive-by shootings and murders in Boston on the nightly news, and they don’t want their children to play in what they perceive as dangerous city neighborhoods. But he said he thinks the biggest reason for the suburban split is athletics.
”They’re tired of getting beat 30-to-nothing every time they go to Boston,” he said.
The Dorchester Eagles have won the conference championship and made it to the national championship tournament at Disney World for the past four years. Libertini and other suburban officials deny they are tired of losing.
Mattapan head coach Walter Applewhite said what is really needed is a heartfelt conversation about race. Applewhite said white suburban players hurl racial epithets at his players all the time. He says his players’ hands get stepped on and their faces get spit on. Still, he and other Boston coaches said it is better that the conference include suburban teams.
”Our city teams love to go play in the suburbs, to see the other side, to see how nice it is in these suburban towns,” said Lazar Franklin, president of the South End Titans.
What is worse, he said, is the players are ”way too young” to deal with racial prejudice. ”This is about the kids,” he said. ”This is ridiculous.”
By Donovan Slack, Globe Staff | June 6, 2005
This is a local issue in Massachusetts, but what we’re seeing here is a widening of the divide between the cities and the suburbs. How will I be able to bridge the gap as a parent in the next twenty years?
The Pop Warner league should crack down on cheating if it’s taking place…but how much of it was about that as opposed to the obvious racial issues? Has anyone else come across this dynamic is their state?
The major gripe of the five teams that left was the abuse of the over/under rule by the boston teams. Basically the rule allows kids over the cut off age to play if they weigh under 120-130lbs. The five teams that left the league accused the boston teams of having about 80% of their team fit this loophole compared to the suburbian teams only having one or two of these players per team. The cutoff age for Pop Warner is thirteen, so players fitting the over/under loophole can be fifteen years of age. The athletic ability of a fifteen year old compared to a thirteen year old is huge, comparable to a WNBA team getting wiped off the floor by Duke’s mens team. I see nothing wrong with these teams leaving this league and I applaud the teams for going to the league and presenting their case and asking for some resolution before leaving.
I wonder how much of this has to do with trying to get the kids into a less competitive league. Cities because they have a larger population pool to recruit from usually can find better athletes, and more minorities also reside in cities widening the disparity even further.
I grew up in the suburbs of Denver and our coaches in high school went to great lengths to keep us away from the city teams, we were about 20 minutes outside of Denver and we would take 3 and 4 hour bus rides so that we could play teams on the western slope.
Their may be a racist side to this but it may have to do with finding easier games.
With this in mind, they should seperate the teams into divisons based on the population size of the area the team is pulling from. I wonder if this is already happening. I’ll check on it and post an update.
They can’t just go and lose every game versus these teams each year. If this is the reason, why the racial overtones?
These is a reason to leave, but the league is at fault for not policing this. If some teams can exploit a weakness in the rules for an advantage, the league should have changed the rules to level the playing field.
The comments about race that are all over this article is what I have a problem with. The coaches should have been able to make their case without shining a light on the black/white thing. It’s a step backward in what we want to teach these kids about life.
I’d be bullshit if a team of 15 year olds were being fielded year after year becuase of a loophole. Why couldn’t the writer have included this in the article? To me it seems like the Globe was hoping to increase circulation by focusing the piece so heavily on race. The print media in Boston is in a bad place right now. I haven’t felt like this since I saw the front page of the Herald that day w/ a headline about how the Celts weren’t filling up the Fleet Center. I hate that about our newspapers here. Mining for negativity.
This myth about monorities being better athletes needs to stop. Most of the best high school teams in the country are from the boondocks and have huge fast farm boys. It’s just that in pop-warner their 15s can’t play due to the weight limit. So it’s a matter of the older/lighter issue, the city teams have a bunch light 15 year olds playing with 13yr olds and it’s unfair. Most of the suburban kids that age are playing high school ball and have left pop warner where the city teams make special arrangements such as not having to attend practice and then they start in the game anyway. The suburban teams follow the rules and because of it are at a dis-advantage. Also some of the city teams have 20yr old coaches who are feeding their players the wrong kind of negative motivation. Not all, but some!