Friday night lights in New Jersey. Sayreville is a typical Jersey town that adores its football team, state champions the past three years. White suburban Democrats in the main, (Black and Latin voters total about 23%) the town voted for Obama in 2008 and Christie in 2009. Maybe they liked the tough guy style of the one time high school football player. But Sayreville's celebration of machismo has been stopped as the ugly underside of bullying has been exposed. - gwc
Cancellation of High School Football Season Leads Sayreville to Ask What Happens Next - NYTimes.com
by Harvey Araton
SAYREVILLE, N.J. — Late on a graying and increasingly gloomy Friday afternoon, with its vaunted football team shut down, shamed and soon to be scarred by the arrest of seven players ages 15 to 17 on sexual crime charges, the band played on.
The Sayreville War Memorial High School marching band, that is.
One staff member said it was just practice. The students went through their paces, as parents drove into the parking lot, mingled and snapped photos, as pizza boxes were stacked on a table with the dinner hour approaching.
“There’s still plenty of stuff for these kids to do,” a band supervisor said. “Jazz band, concerts — they’re not going to be left in the lurch because there’s no more football season.”
On a grassy patch near the empty stadium a few hundred yards away, a few football players tossed a ball around, trying to score them into nets the size of ice hockey goals. This improvised activity would have to do in place of the canceled homecoming game that night against Monroe and the rest of the season, which was called off last week by the district superintendent, Richard Labbe, after hazing accusations of a sexual nature surfaced.
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