At a packed school board meeting Thursday night, supporters of the Haddonfield High School boys’ lacrosse team broke their silence about a racial incident involving a player, blasting school officials for canceling the season and accusing them of mishandling the investigation.
Tom Gramigna, a member of the lacrosse booster club, said the district took an “easy path” in a rush to judgment and abruptly halted the team’s season. Team members were encouraged to come forward and have been “unfairly branded as racists,” he said.
“They’re being accosted as bigots,” Gramigna said.
About 100 people attended the meeting, the first since Haddonfield was thrust into a national spotlight after interim Superintendent David T. Lindenmuth canceled the remainder of the lacrosse season on May 11, following an internal investigation that concluded that a member of the lacrosse team has used a slur against a student from another school — but could not identify the team member.
Lacrosse coach Damon Legato, in his first public comments since the May 1 incident sparked the controversy at the South Jersey school, said athletic officials took the matter seriously and immediately began investigating when the racial slur was reported. Their silence, until now, was wrongly viewed as “a sign of guilt,” he said.
>>Read more: Beyond boys’ lacrosse, on Haddonfield sports teams, racial slurs ‘just happened all the time,’ parents say
A black female athlete from Sterling High School said she was stretching on the Haddonfield track when several players on the lacrosse team walked by and one of them said: “Move, ‘N-word,’ ” according to a police report. She said she could not identify who said it because the players were wearing helmets.
Every member of the team, about 40 players, was questioned, along with the coaching staff, Sangillo said. No one admitted making the slur, he said.
“We believe that one child was at the heart of this,” Sangillo told the gathering.
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