Ipswich has formally suspended six high school lacrosse players for smoking cigars at a graduation celebration. This comes less than a week after the Tigers were forced to forfeit its state semifinal competition in Massachusetts due to a shortage of available players.
It sounds like the administration called their bluff.
The high school lacrosse players and their parents tried to claim the cigars were not real. They were caught in a lie!
Ipswich forfeited its Massachusetts high school lacrosse semifinal game.
Our story begins last Sunday, June 7. A large group of Ipswich High School graduates gathered at Pavilion Beach to celebrate their accomplishment. Several of the graduates posed for photographs with cigars in their mouths. I am not going to post them here but the images went viral on social media so you can probably find them pretty easily if you want to look.
It was a pretty standard graduation photo. I also smoked a cigar with my friends after my high school graduation.
However, the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association strictly prohibits the use of tobacco and the graduation photo showed multiple Ipswich athletes in violation of that rule while still in season. The administration subsequently banned the offending players from partaking in the high school lacrosse semifinal game on Tuesday as a result of their actions. The ruling was final.
Ipswich was the fourth-seeded team in the Division-IV tournament. It was two wins away from its first state championship since 2017 when its most important players were pulled off of the field for smoking a cigar. The Tigers ultimately decided to forfeit the game all together due to a shortage of available players. They only learned of the forfeit on the bus that was supposed to drive them to the game, roughly four hours before the opening face-off.
Cohasset was credited with the win and advanced to the state championship game against Nantucket without playing Ipswich. The game was ruled 7-0 in favor of the Skippers even though they never even took the field for warmups.
Were the cigars real?!
Here is where things get interesting. The suspended high school lacrosse players (and their parents) claimed the cigars were not real. The father of one of the suspended players met with Ipswich High School principal Jonathan Mitchell on Monday before the semifinal game on Tuesday. He explained that he sought advice from a local cigar shop on how to make non-tobacco cigars because he was not able to find novelty cigars in time for graduation.
Mitchell even provided the principal with a receipt for the tea he said he purchased to roll into the cigars. The cigars weren’t real!
Another meeting took place on Tuesday between Mitchell and another father of a player on the lacrosse team. The meeting resulted in the principal calling the police. He, Superintendent Brian Blake and athletic director Tom Gallagher reviewed all of the evidence after the situation had deescalated. The administration ultimately decided to suspend and forfeit.
Players and parents further challenged the ruling on Wednesday. They insisted that the cigars were homemade and filled with tea leaves. It was prop. The cigars weren’t real!
Because of the “uproar generated in the media,” the district reopened the investigation on Thursday. It focused on the receipt for the tea. The copy of the receipt that was provided to the administration had the date and time smudged out. Suspicious, no?
The administrators actually went to a Shaw’s grocery store to verify the receipt. A store manager was able to look up the purchase history in the system. He found that the purchases of tea were actually made on Monday, approximately 20 minutes after the six suspended players and their families were first told of the potential rules violation. As it would turn out, the receipt wasn’t real!
“The manager at Shaw’s was able to print out a receipt that matched the details of the purchased tea bags with a date of June 8th at 1:03 pm, Mr. Mitchell had alerted the six families about the potential violation and the impending investigation by email at 12:41 pm on June 8th,” the school said in a statement. “The receipt indicates that the ‘tea’ allegedly used in the ‘fake’ cigars was actually purchased 20 minutes after the families were notified of the potential violation.”
The suspension was upheld. Ipswich forfeited the high school lacrosse semifinal. It will not be replayed. Season over.
The post Massachusetts High School Lacrosse Players Suspended For Cigar Scandal Got Caught Lying About Fake Receipt appeared first on BroBible.
Massachusetts High School Lacrosse Players Suspended For Cigar Scandal Got Caught Lying About Fake Receipt
Pinoy Human Rights
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