Here’s another “she said/she said”… A cheerleading coach in Cypress, TX went on a rant, screaming at her girls: “Who do you think you all are? Highfalutin Heifers! You can just come and go as you please!” There was more to the rant, but that is the “controversial” part.
And, of course, she’s been removed as the cheer coach. The father of the girl who made the recording is pursuing the issue, and wants her fired.
What gets me is this… it seems, by the way the father and others are reacting (listening, this morning, to a Houston radio station), there is no problem with the coach screaming at the girls. The problem comes because she called the girls “heifers”.
I get that calling a bunch of girls “heifers” is probably not the best teaching method out there. But as a parent, I get that sometimes you need to motivate athletes, and teams, and sometimes that motivation comes in the form of not-so-nice words. My problem, honestly, would be with the entire rant. Especially if this was a regular thing.
I also get that high school kids – especially girls – often act entitled and snobbish, thinking that the world revolves around them. So I understand the frustration that a coach would feel if her girls were acting that way, and judging by the beginning of the rant, “Didn’t I tell you you’re back on the team? And you’re going to give me that? Why don’t you think about something? …Y’all don’t have a mortgage, you get away with crap” – I’d say that was part of the problem.
But it’s the coach who is being disciplined hard, because she injured the self-esteem of the girls by calling them “heifers”. The girl who recorded the rant got two days suspension because the rant ended up on Twitter, but there is no word about what the cheerleaders did to trigger this episode.
Personally, I’m not ready to hang the coach, and if I were at that school, I’d like to know the entire story. How about you?
Us Girls..Our Views 
No. I’m not ready to hang the coach either. A group of girls like this get incredibly snotty a lot of the time. I don’t even care she called them heifers. I would have a problem though if she started singling people out. That kind of “punishment” I don’t go for. If it’s going to get personal with one or two players, I think it should be private. As a group, I see nothing wrong with this.
Kids today I’m sorry to say, on a whole, act so entitled to everything. I find it sad. Most kids don’t even have a job until they go to college and are so unready to leave the nest because they’re so over protected/babied by their parents. It’s not a good thing to do.
If we fired every person who ever put his/her foot in his/her mouth during a moment of frustration, not many people would have a job when all was said and done.
It’s one thing to say the coach behaved poorly at that moment (and quite possibly other moments). It’s another to say that she has no latitude for making a mistake. What exactly are we trying to prove? Do we pay high school coaches so much that we have a right to expect only sophisticated behavior out of them? Come on, many of the most respected Americans have had public moments of guttermouth and lived to tell about it. Politicians, sports heroes, entertainers, etc. are held to a lower standard than a public school coach?
Also, don’t you think it’s an unhealthy message to send to teens, that coaches don’t have normal human emotions and weaknesses? Maybe if coaches and teachers could be a little more “real,” young people would learn a little compassion. Maybe.
I’m not concerned about the term “heifer.” My kid sister used to call me that jokingly, and it had nothing to do with my body type. It seems better than shithead, which is what I would have been wanting to say to a bunch of disrespectful teens.
Two things. (1) my comment got lost. (2) your link doesn’t work.
I fixed one but don’t know how to fix the other. Laura will have to swoop in and save the day.
The link should work now. I don’t know why the other one didn’t work, unless they moved the story. Which they probably did.
Ok so we stopped paddling kids for bad behavior and look where that got us. Now we are to the point where we can’t even talk to them, even if it is a rant? This is a very slippery slope we are on.
Check her hands and feet for nail holes. If you don’t find any don’t expect her to be perfect.
Everyone has a bad day now and then. If you regularly work with teenage girls you are going to have any number of bad days in a single month… unless their cycles synchrenize. So give her a break.
At least she called them heifers…and not cows. LOL!
Ya, nothing wrong with heifers. That’s a nice cow.
This hits home for me. Most of you know that my husband, Jason, has coaches baseball. Granted his boys are 11, and not in high school, and he’s never called them names per-say. But, he has gotten heated with them. Sometimes they need to know you are serious and you need to be taken seriously! If you can’t handle a little “tough love” then don’t play the sport! Coaches are in difficult positions. There is a fine line with some parents, and you never know where you stand. Everyone is different. A heated lecture can be taken one way (for what it really is), and the wrong way from another kid, or parents. I really think parents need to step back and realize, their kid may not be perfect, and may have deserved a little “razing.”
My 7th grade algebra teacher routinely screamed at the class. She called us names… “plant” was a compliment. “Daisy Mae” was a regular, as was “stupider than a rock”, and “you should never have been born”. Daily. She used to have us go to the board and do problems, and if you made a mistake, she screamed at you – in your face – until you figured out how to fix it. She *never* told you where the problem was, or how to fix it.
When we complained, we were told to “toughen up”. Nobody ever questioned her methods.
So I can understand why the girls would be upset, if this was a daily occurrence, I could see how they wouldn’t want to be on her team, or why they would look for support from parents, and would even record the rants. BUT… notice I said rantS. Plural. You don’t punish a teacher based on one single incident. Everybody can have a bad day. S* Happens, and all that.
Like I said in the piece… I don’t care about a single rant, or even a couple over the course of a season. Sometimes it needs to be done. Athletes (and I count cheerleaders among them) must train hard, and sometimes they need a reality check that might involve passion. I don’t care about the name-calling. A well placed insult is sometimes worth a thousand encouraging compliments. My only concern is if this was daily. And if that’s the case, the admin should be in the practices, observing over the course of a season, and *then* deal with it. Not on a one-off that may or may not have been objectively recorded.