As bad as the headline sounds, it actually gets worse.
During the girls basketball game between rival Denver-area high schools Arvada and Alameda a brawl erupted. Areeon Frilot, a sophomore player at Arvada, sprinted from the bench to help her teammates in the fracas.
“My intentions were to go and break up the fight and grab my girl off of their girl,” Frilot said.
However when she got a few feet from the fight her head coach came from behind, grabbed her long hair and viciously flung her several feet to the ground. “I got to about the three point line and that’s when I felt someone grab my hair from the back and throw me,” Areeon said. “My first reaction was that I just got thrown by another girl from the team.”
The school immediately handed down a punishment for the violent interaction: the girl was kicked off the team and suspended from school for five days. Meanwhile head coach Roger Griffin, who is also a teacher at Arvada High School, faced no disciplinary action whatsoever.
“I was just shocked, like I can’t believe that the one person I trusted out of everybody in school was the one to do that to me,” Frilot said.
Areeon’s mother, Melissa Martinez, said she went down to the basketball court to confront the head coach for throwing her daughter. “There was no, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, it was an accident.’ He was just as angry as I was. Like I had assaulted his child,” Martinez said. Martinez then went to the local police and they investigated the incident. However on Friday police told Martinez that the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office had decided to not file charges. And since the district attorney wasn’t filing charges, authorities considered the case closed.
“They didn’t even give me the benefit of the doubt when I didn’t do anything. It’s just like it shows you don’t have any hope or faith in your students to change,” Areeon said.
“I just got no respect at all from the administration,” the sophomore said. “None of them even asked if I was OK the next day, like they were all just pointing fingers, making themselves look like the better person.”
I understand that as a coach you have to attempt to prevent your players from getting involved in a brawl, but you can’t forcibly heave someone to the ground, especially when you’re a grown man and she’s a high school girl.