fired coach

http://msn.foxsports.com/other/story/Massachusetts-high-school-track-coach-fired-over-shirtless-practices-050411

Track coach fired for shirtless boy athletes.

just another ridiculous example of how soft our society has become,both generally and athleticly, Pathetic !!

So does that mean shirts vs. skins is no longer allowed in basketball? There are thousands of open gyms held throughout the state at high schools prior to the season starting where the boys don't have practice uniforms yet (season yet to start) and they are scrimmaging shirts vs. skins.

And since when does an assistant principle have the power to fire a coach "on the spot"? Is this normal? No review process?

I remember in HS the track and cross country teams ran with their shirts off every day in the late spring/early fall heat. We held soccer practice w/o shirts as well if I recall.

I saw the clip last night on Fox25 - suffice to say it seems the coach that was fired could have a case of wrongful termination... According to the story, the AD was "watching" the end of practice and on the last lap on a hot night (last Friday) a couple of boys took off their shirts. The AD "appeared" and applied school policy to wear their shirts. According to the coach the AD was "forceful" about it and when he stepped in to try a deflect the attention, the AD got into his face and eventually fired him on the spot after the coach asked that the AD step out of "his space". There's got to be more to this story... Perhaps it's happened a lot and someone complained forcing the AD to come down and watch. Perhaps its been a running thing between the two - who knows. How many AD's actually have the time (or desire) to come watch the end of the track team practice. Something's very fishy.

Regardless - I agree it's silly for something like this to be such a big deal. It's yet another example of creating "policy" without thinking it through. What if this was a hot summer day during football practice and in order to cool a player down quickly who was overheating they got his pads off including his undershirt. I think I'd rather have that player go without a shirt on school property to perhaps save his life...

With that said, the argument of boys wearing no shirts for practices before practices or the season has started is a good defense. However, in the end it is kind of a bad example, they don't have to go shirtless. Shirts versus Skins is the way I played and still do. But girls have been playing with shirts versus shirts since the beginning of time, so obviously the boys could do the same. I am not saying firing or even punishing the coach is right, but the skins versus shirts falls on deaf ears. I wonder what the attitude would be if 15-18 year old girls decided they wanted to practice shirtless.
Trust me when I say this, some people/kids should never ever take their shirts off, yet they still do.

***Deleted***

Ahhh...a bit chauvenistic there Twine...thanks, but that's taking it a bit far. Do you really think its all men here on the forum? - The Assistant