The coach for a soccer team in Plymouth has been fired after making what school officials say was a racially insensitive remark during a game against Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School; a large segment of the team is made up of Brazilian players.
Thom Holdgate, athletic director for Rising Tide Charter School in Plymouth, confirmed for The Times that former Coach Tony Reis was fired on Wednesday morning, the day after the game. The school released a statement that the coach engaged in “unacceptable behavior unbecoming of a staff member.”
According to coaches at MVRHS, the Rising Tide coach, with his team down several goals in the first half of the game, yelled that they should be speaking in English.
During halftime, according to those there, Reis apologized to the Vineyard coaches, but when the coaches pushed back that what he did was unacceptable, Reis then doubled down and said that they should be speaking English.
The story was first reported in the Boston Globe.
Reis, in a statement emailed to The Times, disputed that his remarks were aimed at players. He said that the Vineyard coach was speaking Portuguese to his players, which he understood having been born in Portugal (he said he moved to the States at the age of 3), and told the coaches that they should be speaking English. Rather than doubling down after apologizing to the coaches, Reis instead said that he questioned how the students would learn to speak English.
Reis maintains that his words were not racist: “I should not have said what I stated; however, through my eyes, what I said wasn’t even close to racist.”
Regardless, Holdgate told The Times that they were aghast the coach had made the remarks, and considered removing him from the game then and there.
Holdgate also praised the Vineyard team for keeping their composure.
Vineyard athletic officials, while disturbed by the interaction, are thanking the Plymouth school for taking swift action.
“We are very supportive of that decision. He’s not going to be doing this anymore,” acting Vineyard Athletic Director Mike Joyce said. “There is no shortage of knuckleheads in the world. That it got addressed is good.”
Vineyard soccer Coach Rodrigo Honorato told The Times that it was an unfortunate and startling moment to see the opposing coach angrily shouting the racist remark out of frustration on the soccer field, noting that roughly 80 percent of his team is Brazilian or from elsewhere in South America. He said that his players were noticeably upset, some angry and some crying on the bus ride home.
Ultimately, he saw it as a learning experience.
“All my kids, they were surprised, and some wanted to react, but I told them, ‘Let me handle it, and you focus on the game,’” Honorato said. “I told them, ‘This is going to happen, but the best way to respond is to score more goals and to make a point.’ And that’s what we did.”
The Vineyard team ultimately won, 7 – 1.
On Wednesday, the team held a debriefing to talk about the experience. Honorato said that they typically get together every day after school for study hall before they practice at 5 pm. During the debriefing, he said that players had a moment to talk about how they felt. He said that some players felt justified that the coach was fired, but others were angry that more wasn’t done. During the game, the referees did not take any action against the coach. Many felt that had the coach been Brazilian or non-English-speaking, the punishment would have been more severe.
“I told them, ‘Unfortunately, we live in a world where this exists. When they go low, we have to keep our head high and be a bigger person.’ And that’s exactly what we did,” Honorato said.
Honorato asked the community show its support for the team by coming out on Saturday and Sunday for the teams’ first home games of the season. On Sunday, as witnessed by Times reporters, Brazilian flags were flying in support of the team.
Go Team!
The coach is technically correct, i.e. speaking another language does not equate to being of another race. Modern humans (homo sapien) speak hundreds if not thousands of languages.
Monolingualism is so passé…
Maybe, the Plymouth team should read a book, like “Our Portuguese Heritage, 1860-1900 : an Informal Genealogy of 3,000 Families on Martha’s Vineyard”
…. or if they came to play in the few decades earlier, “Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language : Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard”. The Vineyard is a living and loving community.
What nationality is the surname Reis?
The Reis surname has multiple origins, most commonly stemming from Portuguese, meaning “kings” or the Three Kings of the Epiphany, and Turkish, meaning “head” or “chief”. It also has a Germanic root, possibly a topographic name for someone from a wooded area, an occupational name for a cobbler, or a shortened form of a personal name.
His behavior is very common with the poorly educated, unable to comprehend your families ancestors and their truths.
Being an American citizen doesn’t mean that you are superior to anyone else.
He should have to take a DNA test.
Allow? They teach foreign languages don’t ya know.
All schools allow foreign languages. There are foreign language classes for Christ sake. This is a dumb question.
How about waving the flag of the country that’s giving you your High School education ? If these players were born in America wave the Stars and Stripes ?? They are Americans, not Brazilian.
Must be other issues with documentation on warnings. One incident does not take an out an employee. Quality lawsuit if that is the case
I took French as a student more than 40 years ago so they’ve been allowing foreign languages for decades. We were offered Spanish as well!
Because some people speak them?
Are you kidden me?