High school coaches should not lead prayers

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"This team is your family." "We stick together, no matter what." "Don't let your brothers down."

All football players have heard such words from every coach they played for. It doesn't matter whether they only played in high school, managed to make it to a college team, or were fortunate enough to play in the NFL. The message is always the same.

The team sticks together if it wants to succeed.

This is what makes the case of Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, to be heard before the U.S. Supreme Court on April 25, such an insidious attack on one of the core foundations of our society — the separation of church and state.

Joe Kennedy was an assistant football coach at Bremerton High School in Washington state. Despite being a public school employee, Kennedy began publicly praying to and with students at the 50-yard line after each game. Parents told the district that their children felt compelled to join him. The school district tried to find an alternative for Kennedy's prayers that wouldn't involve pressuring students, but he refused — and then sued his school district.

First off, the adolescent mind is very impressionable; fitting in with the group is extremely important. I coach freshmen football and I've seen how eager kids are to belong to the team, especially those who have never played football before. Entering a new and defining phase in their scholastic and social lives it's important for them to belong; being ostracized can lead to bullying and depression. The team is family, and not belonging to that family hurts. If a coach calls a meeting, players are expected to attend.

Now let's consider the coach who preaches to kids after a game when they are mentally and physically exhausted, in a public religious ceremony not everyone on the team might have experience with. What a terrible position to put a kid in — an authority figure, with real power to influence whether or not you get to play on the field, is implicitly demanding obedience to a certain religious mind-set. If you walk away, you're walking away from your family.

That's horrible coaching!

Any kid who doesn't attend would be uncomfortable, and a player who feels uncomfortable is not a player giving 100%. Your job as a coach is to help your players achieve their maximum potential, which means you have to care about each and every one of them, and understand what helps and what hurts their chances for success.

From a purely performance-related standpoint, making a single religion a focal component of your team is by definition weakening that team because it excludes all the players who aren't believers of that religion. By making your religious devotion public, you are making your team less cohesive — in other words, worse.

To have the freedom to practice your own religion, other people must have the freedom to practice their own — or to practice no religion at all. In America, the government — including our public schools — must remain neutral to make sure we include everyone regardless of religion. But if the Supreme Court finds in favor of Kennedy, that vital separation of church and state will be cracked, providing further opportunity for fundamentalist zealots to try and enforce their view of society on everyone else.

Ultimately, team as family may sound trite, but it's true. The team is your family in football and the question Kennedy v. Bremerton brings before us is, what kind of family will it be? An inclusive one, that gets the best from its members because they're free to be themselves? Or an abusive one, filled with dictates and demands to conform to a particular religion?

I know what kind of coach I played my best under, as well as what kind of coach I want to be. It's not the kind that splits the team apart by coercing religion.