Harger: Profanity at basketball game leads Tahoma High to remove student section

Usually, a student section is the loudest part of the game. But the gym at Tahoma High School got quiet the other night. And it stayed that way.

In the middle of a boys’ basketball game, an administrator made a call you almost never see anymore. He cleared the student section. All of them. He sent them home.

Here’s what happened

One kid in the crowd yelled at a referee. He didn’t just boo, he dropped the F-bomb. “You f***ing suck.” Loud enough for everyone to hear.

The school stopped the game. They asked a simple question. Who said that?

Silence.

Hundreds of students sat there. They knew who did it. I’m sure it felt like solidarity to the kids in the stands. “Snitches get stitches,” right? But let’s look at what actually happened. They decided to protect the bad apple.

So the administrator made a choice. If you want to stand together as a mob and protect the behavior, you can all leave together.

I read the comments on social media. Parents are upset. Students are furious. They are calling it unfair. They are calling it collective punishment. They are asking why good kids should lose out just because one knucklehead couldn’t control his mouth.

I get it. As a dad, if my teenager got kicked out of a game because the guy three rows back has zero class, I would be annoyed, too. It feels like the teacher is keeping the whole class in from recess.

But let’s take a breath and look at why this was such a shock to those kids.

We have spent years tolerating bad behavior. We see it everywhere. We see it in the hallways. We see it on the streets. We see it in a juvenile justice system that often sends kids home with a warning for things that used to mean handcuffs.

We have raised a generation of kids who believe they are anonymous. They believe they can say whatever they want to an adult. They believe they can disrupt a public event. And they believe that if they just keep their mouths shut, the storm will blow over.

Because usually, it does.

Then they went to a basketball game. And they ran into an adult who wasn’t bluffing.

The school had already warned them. They put out video announcements two weeks ago about sportsmanship. The students knew the line. One of them crossed it. The rest of them decided that the no snitching “code of silence” was more important than the game.

They made a choice. They dealt with the consequence.

This is a tough lesson. But it is a necessary one. The shock these students felt wasn’t because the punishment was cruel. It was because the consequences were actually real.

I wonder what happens at the next game. My guess is that the mood will be different. The next time someone thinks about screaming an obscenity at a ref, the kid sitting next to him isn’t going to laugh. He is going to tell him to sit down and shut up.

That is called social pressure. That is how a healthy community works. We police ourselves so the authorities don’t have to.

We spend a lot of time trying to protect our kids from unfairness. But sometimes, a little unfairness is the only thing that wakes us up. The bleachers were empty, but the message was full. We get what we accept.

Tahoma High School decided to stop accepting it.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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