Student Athletes, Staff Attend Anti-Hate Workshop At Cape Tech

PLEASANT LAKE – Student athletes, coaches and athletic administrators from 13 different local schools gathered at Cape Cod Technical Regional High School last Thursday for an anti-bias and discrimination workshop led by Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society.

The day-long training, called “Addressing Hate in School Sports,” was the “first regional effort of its kind” on the Cape and was organized in collaboration with the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association and the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, according to a press release. The event at Cape Tech was in the works for over a year, Northeastern’s Nicolette Aduama said to the 50-plus students and educators present.

Cape Tech Principal William Terranova said he had participated in similar training from Northeastern a few years ago and, floored by it, knew he had to bring it to students.

“You are the ones who are going to make the difference,” he told the group. “You are the change agents for the issues that we're going to be tackling today, and so you're so important in this work.”

Terranova relayed a story from when he coached soccer at Everett High School early in his career to explain why he was passionate about the topics at hand. Towards the end of one game at another school, Terranova’s players informed him that opposing players were calling them slurs. 

“I had never felt that before,” Terranova said. “I had never experienced that. I looked in their eyes, and there was sadness and anger.”

In response, Terranova told his players to essentially run up the score in the game’s final minutes, which they did. That prompted a defender on the opposing team to punch one of his players in the head. Terranova’s team ran onto their bus to leave, all the while the then first-year coach screamed at the refs that they hadn’t properly controlled the game.

But one of the refs got in Terranova’s face and went, “You did this. You could have fixed this. You did this.” Only down the line did Terranova realize the ref was right, he said, that he had fought “anger with anger.” 

“I should have stopped the game,” Terranova said. “I should have walked over to the refs. I should have called the other coach over, and I should have said, ‘We need to fix this. This can't go on, like this game is not important. It's not important.’ What's important is that people don't speak to each other like this, that people don't call each other names, that people don't try to get under each other's skin by using these hateful, hateful words.”

At the workshop were students and school sports staff from Bourne, Barnstable, Monomoy, Upper Cape Tech, Falmouth, Sandwich, Sturgis East and West, Dennis-Yarmouth, Diman, Nauset and Wareham, in addition to Cape Tech.

Monomoy athletic director Karen Guillemette, Nauset athletic director John Mattson and head athletic trainer Michele Pavlu, and Cape Tech admissions coordinator and head football coach Calvin Castillias and IT instructor and head boys lacrosse coach Gibson St. John attended.

Also at the workshop were Leslie Domínguez-Santos, coordinator for the Barnstable County Human Rights Advisory Commission, and Karen Boujoukos, chair of the Nauset Interfaith Association’s MLK Action Team.

Bob Baldwin, executive director of the MIAA, described in opening remarks that he was president of the Massachusetts Associations of School Superintendents during the murder of George Floyd and “didn't know what to say.”

He learned, he said, from two men — both Boston educators — who were both at the event: Mike Rubin, an assistant director of the MIAA, and Carroll Blake, who was executive director of Boston Public Schools’ Achievement Gap Office.

“I needed to learn and understand who I am,” Baldwin said. “I need to learn every day how to try and bring people together so they love each other.”

Baldwin challenged the students at the workshop to “be courageous.”

“Courageous is doing what's right over what's comfortable,” he said. “What's comfortable is going along with the crowd. What's right is standing up for what's right and the right thing to do.”

Alan Harrison, Cape Tech’s athletic director, told attendees he had participated in a training at which he sat next to Rubin, who told him two race-related experiences. In one, a police officer told a black child to play at a different playground than white children. In another, a police officer pointed a gun at a person of color walking out of a mall in Cambridge, apprehending the man because there had been a complaint of robbery earlier in the day and the suspect was also a person of color. Harrison reported back, at the time, to Cape Tech administrators.

“Mind-blowing,” he said. “Unbelievable. Anything we can do to get our students involved in this training we need to do.”

Northeastern’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society, founded more than 40 years ago, uses sports to lead discussions on social justice issues, Aduama — a senior associate director for the program — said. The center’s four main focus areas, Auduama said, are to raise awareness, challenge thinking, open dialogue and inspire leadership.

Lisa Markland, the center’s lead consultative trainer, presented an array of recent local news headlines covering racist, hate-related incidents in school sports meant to answer the question of “why are we here?”

“We can only imagine what's happening sometimes in the halls, on the fields, and so we decided that we need to start having conversations with y'all, real conversation,” she said. “Get you to talk, get you to say some stuff, so that we can get us all to recognize that you're talking to someone's daughter, someone's son, someone loves them, and how you respond in these situations is based on who you are and who you want to be.”

Students and staff reconvened in the afternoon to review some of what had been discussed. Terranova’s hope was that the Northeastern team provided attendees with the skills and tools “to be able to fight hate.” 

“To confront it and fight it with education, with compassion, with words that will make a difference, that is my hope,” he said. “I know you can do this. I believe in every one of you. I know you can take this forward, alright, and we're going to give you the support to make it happen.”