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Serving the scholastic field hockey and lacrosse community since 1998Archive for February 16, 2022
Feb. 16, 2022 — A hate crime with another ironic twist
Last weekend, an ugly scene unfolded on the campus of Presbyterian College in Clinton, S.C.
The scene was a hill overlooking the home field of the Presbyterian women’s lacrosse teams, where a group of young men, ostensibly students, heckled the Howard University women’s lacrosse team as they warmed up before a game.
According to reports, the men used racial slurs and threatened violence against the women.
The ironic thing about this scenario is that, one year ago, the Emmanuel men’s lacrosse team was the target of racial epithets at an away game against Sewanee.
Sewanee and Presbyterian are religious colleges.
And yet, somewhere and somehow, there were people at these universities who had the idea to yell hurtful epithets at lacrosse players — people who participated in The Creator’s Game.
The Sewanee incident was investigated for several months, but closed in September without any sanctioning of students, calling the evidence against particular attendees “inconclusive.”
The regrettable thing about the Presbyterian incident is that the same thing is likely to happen. That is because the students in question were outside the stadium where the event took place.
Now, yesterday, Presbyterian College president Matt vandenBerg announced that students wouldn’t be allowed to congregate outside Bailey Memorial Stadium or outside any other athletic event. “Students and spectators planning to watch Presbyterian College athletic events in person must enter the athletic venue and sit in the designated fan seating areas,” the statement says.
The statement mentions specific gathering areas for fans at the stadium, at the baseball complex, and at the on-campus tennis courts, which tells me that there have been problems at these facilities before.
But the problem here isn’t crowd control. Or at least the kind you might think of when a group of people go to a sports event. It’s whether Sewanee and Presbyterian have been giving their students the correct kind of education, one which recognizes the basic dignity of every human being.
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