Religion & American Law

Since the early 2000s in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, Mount Carmel Area football teams have concluded the pre-game warm up routine with a full-team quarterback sneak to the end zone where each player could optionally kneel to pray before going back to the locker room while the band played. This past season, head coach Carmen DeFrancesco decided to remove the option for players to pray claiming that it was a way for players to draw attention to themselves. Parents of players, former players, and current players were all outraged due to the team losing its option to pray. The area is heavily populated with Catholics but is also home to different groups of Protestants and occasionally Jewish, Muslim, and Asiatic religious followers. Another reason the public finds this change strange is due to the history of the act. In the short history of the prayer at the end of the warm-up, the Red Tornadoes added two state titles (2000, ’02) to go along with the previous three (1994, ’96, ’98), an Eastern Conference Championship (’09), and four District Championships (’00, ’02, ’08, ’11). This was DeFrancesco’s fourth year as head coach and after a first round playoff elimination there was suspicion that he would be removed due to lack of success causing the parents to not take action believing the next coach would allow the action. Recently however, it has been hinted that DeFrancesco will be returning for a fifth season causing the parents of players to return to expressing their displeasure towards the coaches ruling of removing the end of warm-up routine.

Coach DeFrancesco’s main claim for stopping post warm-up prayer is that this prayer ritual gives the individual player the opportunity to draw attention to his self. As a former player in this program being from Mount Carmel, I felt as though coach DeFrancesco’s decision to remove this prayer opportunity very troubling. I felt as though the removal of the prayer opportunity was not justified as players would remove their helmets, take one knee, and silently pray. Once they finished their personal prayer the player would put his helmet on and jog back to the locker room. In no case was there ever a player drawing attention to his self, not even the last person off. This really upset me because I had been the last player off my entire senior year and the thought that one would interpret my practice of religion as an attempt for attention made my religious activity seem like a show. This is the same point brought forth by parents as a reason for their disliking. For a coach to insinuate that players would use religious activity in order to gain attention is to call the religious activity into question as sincere. Secondly, I found this act to have two consequences in religious freedoms. The first reason is that by eliminating this religious act could be viewed as hostility to religion. The removal of this action keeps players from having an opportunity to express their religious duties and practices. The second reason is the preference of one religion over another. Being a mainly Catholic community, the team recites the Hail Mary prayer together. This prayer is primarily a Catholic tradition and forcing a team to participate without the opportunity to practice their individual religion is insensitive to other religions that team members may be a part of. I believe that the practice should be reinstated because it gives a player a chance to make a personal religious connection before a game in which one may pray for safety, success, or whatever he pleases. While I believe that the coach’s choice should be obeyed as a player, I do not believe that this matter should be dropped. Players should have the opportunity to take that time to pray personally, especially in the hectic pre-game ritual, this opportunity may be the only chance one gets to make a personal connection with their religious beliefs before engaging in competition.