Texas
“We’d lose one after the next”: Texas bats face a pandemic of their own
Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
There should have been 16,000 bats flying that night in mid-July. Instead, only about 500 remained at the cave in Central Texas next to the Colorado River. The rest succumbed to white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that has ravaged bat populations across the country.
Gorman Cave, in Colorado Bend State Park, is one of the caves that Nate Fuller monitors. Fuller, the state bat biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, said by the spring of 2020 — as COVID-19 became a global pandemic — bats in caves and across Central Texas were facing a pandemic of their own.
White-nose syndrome was first detected in Texas on Feb. 18, 2020, when Charles Pekins, a wildlife biologist at the U.S. Army base Fort Cavazos, formerly known as Fort Hood, found a dead bat covered with a white fungus. A few weeks later, a swab he sent to the National Wildlife Health Center confirmed that the disease had infiltrated the Lone Star State.
Across North America, 52% of bat species are at risk of severe population decline in the next 15 years, according to a report published in April by the North American Bat Conservation Alliance. Texas — home to the greatest diversity of bat species in the nation — has not been spared that decline.
About 70 miles south of where the first case was detected, Lee Mackenzie and Dianne Odegard of the Austin Bat Refuge were flooded with calls in February and March 2020 about dead or grounded cave myotis bats with the white fungus on their bodies and tears in their wings. Mackenzie said their wings looked like swiss cheese, a symptom of the disease in some bats.
They said people brought 23 cave myotis bats into their rehabilitation center during those two months; normally they would receive only a few in an entire year.
“We’d lose one after the next, day after day,” Mackenzie said. “We just couldn’t turn them around.”
Before long, Fuller with Texas Parks and Wildlife was receiving calls from 18 counties across the Hill Country with reports of dead bats.
“It was the worst point in my career,” said Fuller, who’s been working with bats for 16 years.
So far, white-nose syndrome has been detected only on cave myotis bats, but Fuller said it’s just a matter of time before it spreads to other species.
After white-nose syndrome was first confirmed in Texas, Fuller started surveying bat roosts in the state. Gradual population declines had been happening for a while, Fuller said, but accurate estimates — bats are notoriously hard to count — didn’t exist.
To get that data, Fuller’s team started taking videos of bats emerging from cave myotis roosts across the state and hand-counting the small, fast mammals one by one as they emerged.
That job largely falls to employees like Alex Buckel, who said going through one hour of footage can take an entire workday.
“If they’re really fast, I have to go frame by frame,” said Buckel, a seasonal bat technician this summer.
At two of the five caves the team surveyed, they recorded population declines of 58% and 70% between 2021 and 2023.
In others, the bats were simply gone. Fuller said they found no bats at Government Canyon in San Antonio, which had an estimated population of 18,000 in 1995.
And at Fort Cavazos, where that first bat with white-nose syndrome was detected, the colony with an estimated 30,000 cave myotis bats in 2015 has also disappeared, according to data collected by Pekins.
While migration and habitat loss could account for some of these drops, Fuller said he’s confident that white-nose syndrome is the primary cause.
More bats, less pesticides
Bats are important for insect control in the state and the Texas economy. Bats eat crop pests and help farmers reduce the amount of pesticides they need to use each year.
According to a 2011 study by leading bat researchers published in Science, bats save farmers $12 to $172 per acre in pest control costs nationally each year. In Texas alone, they estimated that bats saved $1.4 billion by eating crop pests.
Pecan farmer Troy Swift said he never planned to get into bats. But after reconnecting with his old acquaintance Merlin Tuttle — a leading international bat expert — there was no going back for Swift, now the proud owner of 18 bat boxes and counting.
“When I started growing pecans, my parents started calling me nutty, and now that I’ve gotten into bats, they call me batty,” said Swift, who owns 266 acres near Lockhart and planted his first tree in 2001.
He said he wants to attract more bats to his property so they can eat insects and help him reduce — or fully eliminate — his use of pesticides.
Swift installed the first bat boxes in his pecan grove in late fall of 2021, and by the following summer, the new tenants arrived.
Swift said he’s still in the experimental process — trying to figure out what types of bat boxes work best, which species of bats he’s attracting and which insects they’re eating. He wants to confirm that bats are eating pests like the pecan nut casebearer and hickory shuckworm, two moths that damage pecan trees by laying eggs that hatch into larvae and feed on immature pecans. He’s also testing for stink bugs, spittlebugs and flies — which don’t hurt pecan trees but are bad for the nearby cattle farmers.
As president of the Texas Pecan Board, Swift says if he can prove that the bats on his farm are eating the insects that damage pecan trees, he can try to convince other farmers to install bat boxes on their farms.
“It’s probably the only hope bats have,” said Swift, who is also vice president of the Texas Pecan Growers Association. “We have to prove what they do to agriculture.”
Swift, who runs a sawmill, said he’s started building bat boxes and selling them to other farmers.
Winged attractions
Bats also draw in tourism to the state.
Austin’s Congress Avenue Bridge colony attracts 140,000 visitors each year, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Other big bat-watching sites include San Antonio’s Bracken Cave, the world’s largest bat colony, and Fredericksburg’s Old Tunnel State Park — where 40% of the park’s visitors in 2022 came for the bats, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife.
It wasn’t always that way.
In the early 1980s, when Mexican free-tailed bats first moved into the crevices under the Congress Avenue Bridge, there was widespread fear and calls to exterminate the new residents. That panic is what drew Tuttle to Austin, where he started educational campaigns to calm fears about rabies and highlight the benefits of bats.
His work to protect the now-famous bats — considered the largest urban bat colony in the world — inspired the city in 2021 to declare his birthday, Aug. 26, Merlin Tuttle Day.
Other threats to Texas bats
White-nose syndrome isn’t the only threat to bats in Texas.
Across the state, wind turbines kill about 200,000 bats each year — and as more are installed, more bats are being killed, according to Michael Whitby with Bat Conservation International.
There are no policies or regulatory mechanisms in place to reduce bat deaths from wind turbines. That would change if a species like the tricolored bat is added to the endangered species list, according to Sara Weaver, a senior environmental manager at Bowman Consulting.
The tricolored bat, found mainly in eastern and Central Texas, is under consideration to be listed as an endangered species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. If that happens, the agency would develop habitat conservation plans and work with wind facility operators and forest managers to find ways to avoid killing bats, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said.
That would slow down construction of new wind turbines because companies would have to survey for bats in the area and also meet limits on how many bats can be inadvertently killed, Fuller said.
Weaver, who researches ways to balance wind energy and bats, said wind energy companies are looking for ways to prevent bat deaths. Scientists have found that pausing wind turbines during peak bat flying hours would have small impacts on energy production while saving a lot of bats’ lives.
This summer’s sweltering heat also hasn’t spared bats.
Swift said his bat boxes were home to up to 200 bats at one time, but when he checked on them in mid-July this year, he found them abandoned.
“Under these extreme conditions, they want shade,” said Swift, who just installed his first shaded bat box this month.
Bats also need water, and droughts like the one that’s gripped much of Central Texas for more than a year can dry up their water sources and limit their nightly hunting range.
The Austin Bat Refuge receives multiple calls each summer about bats that have suffered from dehydration and heat exhaustion from bat boxes placed in the sun. They said that to minimize risk, bat boxes should be placed so they’re not exposed to late afternoon sun. In a pinch, owners can put aluminum foil on the west side of boxes to reflect heat.
Just as climate change has led to an increase in extreme heat events in Texas, it’s also caused an increase in extreme cold that can harm bats. During the 2021 winter storm that hammered most of Texas with days of below-freezing temperatures, the Austin Bat Refuge took in 4,000 bats that had fallen from bridges across Travis County. Only 600 survived.
Last winter, Mackenzie with the Austin Bat Refuge said he spent his Christmas Eve collecting more than 1,000 frozen bats from under Round Rock’s Mays Street Bridge and other sites near Austin after a powerful cold front dropped temperatures below freezing across the state. Only 145 survived.
Over the next few years, Fuller, the Texas Parks and Wildlife bat expert, said he plans to continue visiting caves across Texas to count bat populations — and to see if bats return to some of the roosts where they recently disappeared. He wants to concentrate the agency’s efforts on researching white-nose syndrome and trying to understand which bats are most impacted by wind power expansion in order to minimize deaths.
“Bats are unique, awesome, wonderful parts of nature,” Fuller said. “Whether I can say that they’re worth money, or they’re worth tourism, or they warn you about things that are happening in the environment around you, they’re just so freaking cool.”
Disclosure: Texas Parks And Wildlife Department has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
The full program is now LIVE for the 2023 Texas Tribune Festival, happening Sept. 21-23 in Austin. Explore the program featuring more than 100 unforgettable conversations coming to TribFest. Panel topics include the biggest 2024 races and what’s ahead, how big cities in Texas and around the country are changing, the integrity of upcoming elections and so much more. See the full program.
Texas
Trump demonizes immigrants. So why is he winning so many Latino votes?
Back in 2015, when Donald Trump first descended from his golden escalator in New York City, Alexis García was attending high school in the Texas border town of Rio Grande City. In those days, it seemed, everyone in his classes hated Trump. The town of 15,000 serves as the seat of rural Starr County, which is 97% Latino and has voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election for the past 100 years. García was too young to vote in 2016, but he supported Bernie Sanders. That year, Hillary Clinton destroyed Trump in Starr, winning 79% of the vote.
But after Trump took office, García began to find himself drawn to Trump’s bombast. He liked the nicknames Trump came up with for his opponents — they reminded him of his own nickname, Pelón, meaning baldy for his buzzed hair. “Trump is like a schoolyard bully,” García tells me, meaning it as a compliment. By the end of 2017, as a high-school senior, he’d become a full-fledged Trump supporter.
At first, seeing how his classmates went after other Trump fans, García chose to keep his political conversion to himself. “Tienes nopal en la frente,” his friends would tell Trump supporters — you’ve got a cactus on your face. The meaning of the insult was clear: You’re only Mexican on the outside. When García finally told people he liked Trump, he was denounced as a racist. “How can you do this to your own kind?” people would ask.
“Coming out as a Republican was probably worse than coming out as an LGBT person,” says García, who works at a local supermarket. “They would shame you for it.”
At the time, García felt like he was part of a minority in South Texas. MAGA was a sort of counterculture among Latinos, a tiny band of provocateurs who enjoyed pissing off the dominant Democrats. But beneath the surface, a seismic shift was underway. When the results were counted on election night in November 2020, García was as shocked as everyone else to discover that Republican turnout in Starr County had nearly quadrupled from 2016. Joe Biden still won, but barely — 52% to Trump’s 47%. Trump had gained more ground in Starr than in any other county in America.
Since then, political analysts have been questioning whether Democrats are losing their long-standing advantage among Latino voters. How had a candidate who once called Mexicans “rapists” done so well in a Mexican American county? In July, before Biden exited the race, polls found his support among Latinos had fallen below 50%. And even since Kamala Harris won the nomination, polling has indicated she’s likely to win no more than 58% of Latino voters — a far cry from what Democrats used to muster. That’s especially significant this year because Trump doesn’t need to win a majority of Latino support to retake the White House. If he can peel off enough of the 36 million Latino voters, especially in hotly contested swing states such as Arizona and Nevada, it could prove to be the margin of victory.
In late July, after Biden dropped out of the race, I traveled to Starr County to see why this longtime Democratic stronghold has been shifting steadily to the right. To be sure, Starr differs from other border towns in some significant ways, especially in its relative dearth of recent migrants. But the county underscores how being Latino is becoming less predictive of how someone will vote. The area is working class, and its politics are similar to much of rural America. There’s a reverence for law enforcement and the military, a sense of economic instability, and a nagging suspicion that liberal elites in Hollywood and on Wall Street think of locals as ignorant hicks. In Trump, they see a man who offers something different. “People tell me they’re going to vote for him,” García says. “Trump is going to win.”
On a humid July morning, Benito Treviño, 77, is walking along the dirt road of his ranch, nestled among the thickets of Tamaulipan thornscrub that grow north of Rio Grande City. Reaching up, he grabs a bean pod from one of the large mesquite trees. “We can grind these into flour with a hammer mill we built,” says Treviño, a biochemist and botanist by training who now runs a native-plant nursery. Like the mesquite and huisache that thrive in this arid climate, he has deep roots in Starr County.
Treviño traces his family’s ancestry back to the earliest Spanish colonists, who made their homes on thin ranches along the Rio Grande. When the US annexed half of Mexico in 1848, those Mexican ranchers suddenly became American. Instead of them moving to America, America moved to them. Today, many South Texans like Treviño see themselves as more Tejano than Mexican American.
This explains, in part, why Biden’s campaign struggled to get traction among many Starr residents. His 2020 playbook for Latinos was built around celebrating immigrants and affording them a sense of belonging — one of his slogans was “Todos con Biden.“ But many here don’t identify as immigrants. Treviño was born in 1947 and grew up helping his parents work the lands his family had been on for generations. He’s American.
Like almost everyone in his generation, Treviño was raised as a Democrat, he says, for one simple reason: There were no Republicans in Starr County. “I never heard the word ‘Republican’ growing up,” he says. “There was no Republican Party here.” For more than a century, Democrats enjoyed complete control of local government, often running unopposed in general elections. That dominance, at its worst, led to graft and corruption as powerful families passed down elected offices like heirlooms. When Treviño’s father spoke out against the local leadership in Starr, the Democratic bosses found a way to show their displeasure: Treviño claims that when officials decided to improve a dirt road that ran through the county, they left the stretch in front of the Treviño home unpaved.
The machine politics compelled Treviño to turn away from the Democrats. He was also prodded by his wife, Toni, a chemist turned lawyer who moved to Starr from Houston. As an outsider and self-identified libertarian, she was shocked by the county’s rampant cronyism. “Why are you a Democrat?” she asked her husband. “You’re a hard worker. You’re very conservative in your values.” The Treviños became Republicans, and today Toni serves as the chair of the Starr County GOP.
While the worst instances of machine politics were eradicated by the 1980s, many old-timers like Treviño remain deeply suspicious of the Democratic Party. In South Texas counties where Democrats have controlled local politics for generations, Republicans can offer themselves as the party of something new. And polls indicate the same shift taking place across the country: Latinos are much more likely to see Trump, rather than Harris, as the candidate offering a chance at major change.
If any place embodies the dual identity among Latinos in Starr County, it’s the Rancho Cafe in the tiny town of Roma. On the outside, the restaurant has the wooden facade of an Old Western saloon, complete with a covered wagon in the dirt parking lot. Inside, however, it’s classic Tex-Mex. Traditional Mexican dresses hang for sale along the walls of the café, and the servers greet you in Spanish.
At lunchtime, Aliriam Perez sits sipping a bowl of caldo. Both her parents are from Miguel de Alemán, a Mexican city across the border that would blend in seamlessly with Roma if it weren’t for the heavily patrolled river separating them. Perez grew up mostly on the US side, though she crossed over frequently to spend time with family. Her mother was adamant that Perez never lose touch with her culture — she didn’t want her daughter to become “pocha,” Americanized. Though Perez at times rebelled against her mother’s wishes, at 34 she’s come to appreciate the importance of her Mexican heritage. Now that she has two boys of her own, she’s raising them bilingual. “It’s part of their history,” she says. “It’s where they come from.”
Growing up, Perez wasn’t very political. But that changed when she married a local police officer. In 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Perez was deeply offended by the way Democrats supported calls to “abolish the police.” It felt like an affront to her husband, who was “out there putting himself in danger,” she says. Breaking with her mother, who believes that it’s crucial for Mexican Americans to vote against Trump, Perez began volunteering with the local Republican Party. As she sees it, a vote for “law and order” Trump is a way to both honor and protect her husband and other first responders.
In one recent poll, only 9% of Latino voters cited immigration as their top priority.
Democrats maintain a significant advantage among Latinos like Perez’s mother, first-generation immigrants who speak Spanish as their first language. But that advantage weakens among the second and third generations — not because American-born Latinos like Perez are more distant from their heritage but because they’ve started to prioritize other issues in the voting booth. The top two concerns among Latinos this year are the same as those for their fellow Americans: the economy and healthcare. In one recent poll, only 9% of Latino voters cited immigration as their top priority.
Starr’s economy is propped up not only by law enforcement, including the Border Patrol, but also by the oil and gas industry. During García’s childhood, he recalls, his immigrant father would make the long drive out to the Permian Basin in West Texas, where he worked as pipe fitter. Oil production has grown under Biden, and Harris says she has no plans to ban fracking. But to García, it’s obvious that Republicans are far more keen to expand drilling. Voting for Trump, as he sees it, is his best bet to keep his dad employed.
To be sure, “oil worker” is not a big part of Latino identity in swing states like Arizona and Nevada. Democrats, in fact, have long played to Latino voters by emphasizing the discrimination they face in the energy industry and law enforcement. But that appeal is beginning to lose its appeal. Perez says she knows racism exists in America — a white worker in an Alabama Dairy Queen once refused to serve her because she’s Mexican. But she doesn’t see discrimination as the province of any one political party. “There are Democrats who are racist and there are Republicans who are racist,” she says. Latinos still tell pollsters they consider the Democratic Party more welcoming to them than Republicans. But there are signs the political cohesion of “Latinidad” is beginning to fracture. Across the country, Latino Republicans say they feel more able to wear their politics on their sleeve. When people give them a hard time about voting for Trump, they’ve adopted a proud and defiant comeback. “¿Y qué?” they reply — “So what?”
In his home on his ranch along the northern edge of Starr County, Rick Guerra keeps one room as a sort of museum of his time in the Army: his vest from his days as a tank gunner during the invasion of Iraq, his boots from his deployment in Afghanistan. On one wall, there’s a collection of medals and challenge coins. As a teenager, Guerra helped his father and brothers build this very house. After he retired from the Army, he moved in with his wife and two children.
Leaning conservative since he was a kid, Guerra became a dedicated Republican during his time in the Army — and he’d like to see America return to the days of George W. Bush, when the military was flush with cash. Like many Latino-majority counties in Texas, Starr sends a higher percentage of its young men and women to the military than the rest of the country. Most families have at least one veteran in their family tree, and that has contributed to the fiercely pro-military tenor of the local political culture.
There’s another dynamic at play on Guerra’s ranch: This is rural America, where Democrats have been hemorrhaging support for over two decades. Today, the political gulf between urban and rural areas is a greater divide than the split between North and South. While three-quarters of rural Americans are white, huge swaths of rural counties in Texas and other states are majority Latino. As a result, millions of Latinos are beginning to experience what demographers call “rural resentment” — like other MAGA supporters, they feel disrespected by politicians and the media on the urban coasts. And efforts by Democrats to counter such perceptions, like passing the Inflation Reduction Act to create energy jobs in rural areas, have had little effect on attitudes among Latinos and other rural voters.
“If you’re blue collar, you’re blue collar — it doesn’t matter where you’re from,” Guerra says. “And if you’re blue collar, you want a president who is going to get his hands dirty and do stuff for the country and its people.”
Trump’s working-class support in Starr has been most visible in the string of “Trump Trains” that have been taking place across South Texas. In June, at the first rally of the summer, I speak with a professional portrait photographer named Roel Reyes as he’s adjusting the flags on his motorcycle on the southern edge of Route 83. He’s flying the Texas Lone Star flag next to the Stars and Stripes; on the front of his bike are two signs that proclaim “TRUMP 2024.” Reyes smiles as pickup trucks and other bikes pull over behind him, all of them flying Trump banners. Before long, the parade of vehicles snakes 15 miles southeast from Roma to Rio Grande City.
In 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, Reyes helped organize the county’s first Trump Train. At the time, the riotous parades felt like a protest as much as a rally, a way to openly flout the COVID shutdowns being enforced by local Democrats. Reyes recalls getting plenty of “single-finger salutes” from townspeople. But the trains also gave him the sense that Trump was more popular in Starr than the polls might indicate. During the rallies, he’d get waves from local folks he knew would never admit to supporting Trump in mixed company.
“Trump puts the country first. He puts God first — he’s for border control,” Reyes says. Next to him, an off-duty Border Patrol agent who has joined the Trump Train nods in agreement.
Local Democrats and Republicans agree that the trains gave Trump an electoral advantage in 2020. During the pandemic, Democrats — following strict instructions from the Biden campaign to avoid spreading the virus — stopped knocking on doors and focused instead on their digital strategy. Republicans, meanwhile, kept staging the Trump Trains, knocking on doors, and throwing well-attended barbeques and “asadas.” Democrats have become accustomed to hemorrhaging support from working-class white voters. But now it’s clear that more and more Latinos — who are overrepresented in the working class, especially in South Texas — are flocking to the Republicans. Being Latino, it appears, no longer dictates how someone will vote.
The Trump Train being held is small, but Reyes already has plans to hold larger rallies all across the border lands. This first train, he says, “will be like the trailer before the movie.” But it’s hard to hear him. Every few minutes, passing trucks honk their horns, their drivers waving out their windows at the sea of MAGA flags blanketing the dry, thorny landscape that once belonged to Democrats.
Jack Herrera is a freelance journalist who reports on how immigration and demographic change impacts individual lives. He was previously a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and senior editor at Texas Monthly.
Texas
‘We Weren’t Loud Enough!’ Texas A&M Proves That ‘Talking Down’ Kyle Field is Personal
COLLEGE STATION, Tx. — Standing along the back end zone as the Missouri Tigers attempted offense at Kyle Field, Texas A&M Aggies yell leader Kyler Fife kept it simple.
“Oh hell yeah,” he said when asked if the crowd at Texas A&M took Missouri’s challenge personally. “Oh hell yeah. I thought we weren’t loud enough!”
His arms outstretched for the latter statement, it was clear that Fife was among the crowd who did take it personally. And the aforementioned challenge?
Kyle Field was not as loud as the Tigers’ practice sessions.
“At some point it can only get so loud,” Missouri quarterback Brady Cook said during the week. “In my opinion, the noise at practice is actually louder. They put these big speakers pretty much two feet right behind me. You can’t hear anything.”
Evidently, The 12th Man made sure such was the case for Cook and company throughout the contest. By the end of the game, the Tigers were forced into a delay of game penalty, two false starts — back to back, no less — and a snap that came too early on a fourth-and-long they certainly needed.
Interestingly enough, the fans didn’t need much help getting pumped up, but they got some anyway. On a critical possession that would have given Missouri some momentum to chip away at the early 17-point lead the Aggies crafted, all it took for the student section to make a difference was a Sheck Wes song.
“Mo Bamba” rang through the speakers three times in a row on three straight plays. And the result was exactly what Texas A&M hoped for. Another failed offensive possession.
“It was kind of like playing the NCAA game,” Aggies edge rusher Nic Scourton said. “Going out there, having fun. Kyle Field’s rocking. We got them backed up. It’s something you dream of as a kid. Like, it’s crazy. It’s just this place is so special to play.”
With how special it’s seen, it made sense that the Maroon & White didn’t take kindly to any outsiders talking down on it, as Scourton explained. Especially not the noise factor.
“It has been interesting that we’ve had people call out Kyle Field a little bit,” Aggies coach Mike Elko said on The Aggie Football Hour. “I heard their quarterback say today that it’s louder in practice than it is at Kyle Field. To me, that’s a challenge to the 12th Man.”
“They kind of lit a fire on us,” Aggies edge rusher Nic Scourton added. “Coming into our place … talking down on Kyle Field. I think guys were really motivated to go out there and be dominant.”
That’s what happened. Texas A&M out-gained Missouri through the air, on the ground, in time of possession and everything else in-between. In the books, the win goes down as a complete domination. To the fans, it was a lesson taught to the Tigers.
And to the players? It was a personal statement.
One they felt good about making.
“What I took personally (was) them saying that their practice would be louder than our stadium,” Aggies leading rusher Le’Veon Moss said. “I took that personal because our 12th Man supports us to the end, no matter what happens.”
Texas
Texas High School Football Team In Trouble For Whipping Opponents With Belts After Blowout Victory
A Texas High School football team is facing criticism after not only putting a beating on their opponents 77-0, but also taking belts and whipping some of the opposing team’s players afterward in the handshake line.
Players at the Houston-based Willis High School were seen on a video posted on Facebook taking large belts and swinging them at members of the Cleveland High School team during the customary postgame sportsmanship handshake. At one point, one of the Cleveland players jumps out of the way in order to avoid getting whipped while Willis’s players laugh at their opponent.
WINNING FOOTBALL TEAM TOOK BELTS AND SPANKED / WHIPPED OPPONENTS
Yikes.
If being shut out by 70+ points wasn’t humiliating enough, imagine having your opponents then haze you in front of your teammates, family and school? Not a laughing matter, according to some of the Cleveland player’s parents.
“That’s just shady and there’s no point in doing that. It’s just very childish for them to do that,” Melanie Gonzales told KRHO TV.
“I just don’t get it. I don’t, and I’d be very pissed off if I’m scrolling on my phone, and I see my son getting hit with the belt,” Mary Almaguer also told the outlet as she said that the whole situation was ridiculous. In a statement, Willis High School said that the players involved in the whipping would be suspended for the first half of their next game, partake in community service and receive other disciplinary measures.
For Almaguer, that’s not enough.
PARENTS ARE CALLING THE SCHOOL DISTRICT TO FILE A COMPLAINT
“I think more than just half of a game suspension, maybe the rest of the season, some counseling,” the player’s mom said. Meanwhile, Cleveland High School released their own statement saying that Willis’s actions were uncalled for and they have contacted the proper district and league officials to file an official complaint.
How times have changed! Back when I was playing sports, the biggest thing we had to worry about was if someone spit on their hand before we all lined up. But to have to maneuver your way around the line so that you don’t get whipped and spanked is absurd.
Also, where were the coaches of either team while all of this was going on? How does nobody step up in that situation ?
Unfortunately, the whipping doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon as more Gen Zers are partaking in the trend for some unknown reason.
-
Technology4 days ago
Charter will offer Peacock for free with some cable subscriptions next year
-
World3 days ago
Ukrainian stronghold Vuhledar falls to Russian offensive after two years of bombardment
-
World3 days ago
WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange says he pleaded ‘guilty to journalism’ in order to be freed
-
Technology2 days ago
Beware of fraudsters posing as government officials trying to steal your cash
-
Virginia4 days ago
Status for Daniels and Green still uncertain for this week against Virginia Tech; Reuben done for season
-
Sports2 days ago
Freddie Freeman says his ankle sprain is worst injury he's ever tried to play through
-
Health21 hours ago
Health, happiness and helping others are vital parts of free and responsible society, Founding Fathers taught
-
News22 hours ago
Lebanon says 50 medics killed in past three days as Israel extends its bombardment