The superintendent of the Chippewa Valley school district said Wednesday that the decision to suspend the head football coach of Dakota High School for his team's playoff game earlier this month was "the right thing to do." Dakota lost the second-round game to Sterling Heights, 38-35.
The team's coach, Greg Baur, was suspended for failing to keep his players a safe distance from a fire on school property after their upset of Chippewa Valley in the regular season finale. The fire was the result of the father of a Dakota player burning his own Chippewa Valley varsity jacket.
"As leaders, as adult leaders, we have a responsibility to protect out students, a responsibility to protect our athletes," superintended Ron Roberts told 97.1 The Ticket. "I watched that fire. The students should have been moved away from that fire. That coat was doused in an accelerant. That is not a safe situation for our students to be in.
"If a teacher came back to their school building with their kids from a field trip and a parent they knew was burning something on school property, they certainly would not allow their students to go stand around it. It was not a safe situation. As far as our students, our students have never been implicated in any wrongdoing. We've never said that from the beginning. This is about a total lack of leadership on the coaching staff."
Roberts added, "It is just plain common sense that you don't gather around a fire."
Asked if there was any alternative to suspending the coach, such as fire safety classes, Roberts said, "Anyone that goes through a process in which you collect all the facts, at the end you have to make the tough decision. People can say we could have done something different, I stand behind it. It was the right thing to do."
In addition to the suspension itself, Dakota players and parents were upset that the decision wasn't made until the night before their team's game.
"Unfortunately we didn't control the timeline," said Roberts. "We began our investigation on Monday, we investigated that incident up until 9:30 Thursday night. We did it in order to make sure we had collected all the facts, and the timeline was not ours to control."
