“Nice punt, goalie,” my daughter said out loud to an opposing player in the middle of a soccer game. That isn’t so unusual—my coaches and I are often complimenting the other team on solid passes, interesting foot moves and amazing shots.
But her teammate didn’t understand the comment. “Why are you complimenting the other team?” she asked with a somewhat incredulous tone in her voice.
“Because it was a nice punt,” my daughter replied, in a tone that suggested a level of “duh” that only an 11-year-old girl can muster.
“Yes, but you don’t compliment the other team,” her teammate replied.
Ah, I thought, teaching moment! “Why not? She had a great punt, we should respect the other team and compliment nice moves when we see them."
The now somewhat confused girl said simply, “Yeah, you can think it, but you don’t say it. You just … don’t."
The game moved on, the field shifted, as did our attention, and the girls needed to get on the field. But the conversation stuck with me. What have we taught our daughters that this simple act of respect is questioned?
The recent incident at a high school basketball game in which Catholic Memorial High School students chanted anti-Semitic slurs at the Newton North team seems to have shocked my own community. Those chants were preceded by chants from Newton kids that can be easily seen as homophobic. I heard one parent defend the Newton chants as something that goes on all the time and not meant to offend, saying it was just gentle ribbing. As Newton Superintendent David A. Fleishman pointed out, it’s how it’s perceived that truly matters.
But what no one seems to be questioning here is the fact that the chanting exists at all. Why does one team need to chant and taunt the other?
We use high school team sports as a teaching tool, helping kids learn about teamwork, healthy living, rules, strategies and even sportsmanship. Why do we teach them that tearing down another team is OK?
I read about the incident while sitting halfway across the state at a FIRST Robotics competition, watching kids, many of whom are classmates of the basketball players involved in the chanting, compete on an entirely different playing field. Forty teams battled fiercely, but not one ever taunted another. In this venue, despite the high degree of competition, it’s simply not done. Built into the FIRST Robotics program is a concept championed by Woodie Flowers, a founder of the organization along with Dean Kamen and a longtime professor at MIT, of "gracious professionalism." This idea means that you can be competitive and strive to have the best robot on the field, but you respect the hard work that others around you put in.
This is built into the nature of how FIRST Robotics does competitions. Each team that built a robot must work alongside other teams and their robots to compete on the field. Those “alliances” of robots change throughout the day, meaning that a competitor one moment becomes a teammate the next. Later in the competition, when it moves toward the finals, teams pick their own alliances that will last for the rest of the day. They win together and lose together.
Everyone knows that the challenge of building something is hard, they respect the work everyone else put in and what it took for them to even put a robot on the playing field.
The chants that these teams shout from the stands aren’t meant to tear down another team, they're to boost their own. They jump up and down when things go well and get dejected when they don’t. They groan and rush back to the pits to help repair a damaged bot.
But that disrespectful culture just doesn’t exist.
Today our national culture sees arguments as only a zero-sum gain, that agreeing with an opponent means losing. If one side is right, then the other must be wrong. It happens in national politics in everything from health care to the Supreme Court. For Democrats to see problems in Obamacare means caving to the Republicans. For Republicans to even hear from a Supreme Court nominee means they gave in to the Democrats.
We see this at rallies for Donald Trump, in which protesters are not seen as expressing their opinion, but antithetical to the very existence of the candidacy itself. Their injuries are little more than collateral damage.
It’s a culture that leads to hatred even at a high school basketball game. The difference between “gentle ribbing” and racist chants is just a matter of degrees—it starts with a lack of respect for the opponent.
My daughter knows how difficult it is to get off a good punt under pressure. She works to get it right. So when she sees a nice punt she knows what went into making that punt work. She has respect for the person doing it, even when it’s not on her team.
Maybe if, on the field and off, everyone respected the hard work that others put in, we wouldn’t be so quick to tear each other down.
Chuck Tanowitz is a Newton parent.
