Students rally to support suspended soccer player

Amy Dempsey

thestar.com

Dozens of people cheered and chanted Friday outside Northern Secondary School in Toronto to support a student suspended for criticizing the school.

“Commended, not suspended,” the group of mostly students shouted.

Loud cheers broke out when the suspended student, Emil Cohen, read a speech he had been stopped from delivering at the school on Nov. 22.

“This is an issue of free speech, especially when the speech made was constructive,” said Harrison Jordan, one of the rally organizers. “It was the right time and the right place.”

The group is demanding the school apologize to Cohen, reinstate his physical education privileges, and wipe the suspension from his record.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has joined those urging Northern’s administration to rescind Cohen’s suspension.

In a letter to Principal Varla Abrams, the organization said it has “significant concerns” about a school policy that allows staff to “effectively censor students by receiving any speeches they intend to deliver in advance or prevent them from voicing their complaints.”

“Emil stood up for what he thought was right,” said Henry Lee Hienonen, a 16-year-old Grade 12 student who was also a rally organizer.

The principal’s decision to suspend Cohen, 17, was one Northern’s principal made with a “heavy heart,” said Supt. Ian Allison.

“The issue here is not the speech itself,” he said. “The issue is there was a process and he didn’t follow through.”

Another crowd of students heckled the rally from across the street, yelling “Find a real cause.”

“I'm upset because it shows the school in the wrong light,” said Grade 12 student Daniel Sorek.

Rugby and football player Lucas Valverde, also a Grade 12 student, shouted back at the rally: “Who is we? The school's over here, not over there.”

Cohen was suspended after he was cut off delivering a speech at an athletics assembly at the north Toronto high school that criticized the way the soccer team had been treated.

The school didn’t try hard enough to find his soccer team a teacher-coach last year, which meant they had to sit the season out, he said.

Cohen has said he made his speech more positive after exchanging emails the night before with his teacher. The school has countered that the speech he read wasn’t an approved version and he disobeyed his teacher.

“I’ve been taught that if you are treated poorly you should do something about it,” Cohen told the Star earlier this week.

Not good for the Spengler Cup demographic

Students flocking to fringe sports: OFSAA report

David Grossman

The annual participation report of the Ontario Federation of Schools Athletic Association shows that archery, ultimate Frisbee and mountain bike racing are gaining in popularity.
Traditional sports like football and boys' basketball, meanwhile, are in decline, while wrestling and track and field are in deep trouble.
Soccer, with more than 31,000 competitors, has taken over as the most popular sport. It's No. 1 among boys and a close second to volleyball for girls.
But one provincial official says information from 709 of 850 schools completing the survey clearly shows that teenagers are moving to the fringe sports.
"For years, the traditional sports of basketball and football were the classics," said OFSAA assistant director Steve Sevor, who was responsible for gathering and interpreting the data.
"Now, there are so many options and coaches ... are creating opportunities to compete in sports that some 20 years ago you'd only read about in books."
The numbers also show a dramatic increase in participation among girls.
Sevor says young women are flocking to rugby, ice hockey, softball, lacrosse, fencing and curling. For boys, mainstream sports are being abandoned in favour of cricket, weightlifting, golf and dragonboat racing.
OFSAA, which stages provincial championships in 30 sports, is now concerned about the future of some of its playoffs, with numbers of athletes, the availability of volunteer coaches and financial support being the determining factors.
The irony is that even though student participation is up, annual provincial government grants to OFSAA have hit an all-time low of just $70,000. The body has had to scratch for funding, relying more and more on corporate sponsorships, fundraising and student fees to make ends meet.
The Ministry of Health Promotion offered an additional $50,000 recently, which OFSAA divvied up for 60 special projects that paved the way for season-long, seasonal or one-time school events in beach volleyball, scuba diving and boxing.
"I'm sure there will be a point when we have too many (Ontario) championships and some sports might not survive," said Sevor.
Tracey Parrish, principal of Toronto's Francis Libermann High, heads a 10-member committee looking at the future direction of Ontario school sports.
"The goal is to get young people involved, get a sense of what the public wants and to be responsive," she said. "Wrestling has almost disappeared in our league, boys' gymnastics used to be around but it died because of a lack of qualified coaches, and there was a time when I coached synchronized swimming."
Parrish, who is considering starting a football team at her school, said there's huge interest in cricket.
Surprisingly, boys' basketball suffered a slam dunk in the numbers game, a development that stunned Roy Rana, coach of the four-time defending provincial champions from Eastern Commerce and OFSAA's basketball chairman.
"I'm very surprised by that but I don't have a doomsday vision for this sport and maybe we'll be able to find out why it shouldn't be flourishing," he said.