April Gehl, a three-sport star at Hilbert High School in eastern Wisconsin, told postcrescent.com that she “couldn’t believe” she was penalized for “tweeting my opinion”.
Advertisement
In an email sent out in late December, the WIAA listed several chants directed at opposing participants and fans that would be considered unsportsmanlike behavior.
The email, obtained by The Post-Crescent following the controversial suspension of a star student-athlete, details the effort to eliminate chants directed at opposing teams or fans. Consequences for violations of any given school’s athletic code are determined at the local school level. The aim is to have a little more respect and a little less chanting of phrases like “air ball” and “scoreboard”.
“The email that I had sent with the screenshot with that tweet, with the profanity in it, basically I said, for your information, we customarily provide this to our member schools for their awareness”, WIAA Director of Communications Todd Clark said.
“I was thinking, ‘How did they get it so quickly?'” Jill Gehl said of the WIAA seeing her daughter’s tweet.
I should point out that a spokesman for the WIAA told television station WISC that the sportsmanship guidelines are a point of reference and “not a requirement”.
Gehl’s Twitter response to the WIAA’s email included profanity, and Hilbert officials, after being informed by the WIAA of Gehl’s tweet, suspended the Wolves’ leading scorer and rebounder for five games. “It doesn’t just happen; it takes time and you have to have strong leadership”.
He went on to say “school administrators and event managers should take immediate steps to correct this unsporting behavior”. School officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for clarification Tuesday night and no one answered the phone at a number listed as Gehl’s home line.
Advertisement
Gehl’s tweet, which was originally posted January 4, remains public as of Wednesday. She said Hudson hasn’t had sportsmanship issues in years. She started serving her suspension on Friday. It is likely that the WIAA, like many businesses and organizations (including WSN), has a Twitter search or alert set-up to identify any mentions of them. Ideally, people under 18 (and maybe even under 30) wouldn’t use their real first and last names in social media, they would protect their accounts, so only friends can see their content and their photos and videos wouldn’t show up in a routine google search (have you ever searched your kids’ names online?).
