Joining in on postgame prayers?

[ZummoSports]

This is something that's crossed my mind a few times this football season. After football games, when the whole team is huddling up for the team prayer and you're waiting for them to break so you can get quotes, has anyone ever joined in?
Sometimes I'll wander too close to the huddle and am close enough to grab a hand or put one on a shoulder when the prayer starts...

Do you ever wander too close to the sideline during the game and kinda, sorta, maybe feel like you should run a deep slant pattern? Or take a handoff?

Actually, I thought about running a pattern when I was covering a game and the quarterback threw the ball right to me although I was five yards behind the sideline.

So I did the next best thing. Ran the heck out of the way, forgot about the slight incline and fell on my face.

 

[Kaylee]

I am a firm beliver in prayer, whether it's myself, the football team or the officials. Since prayer was taken OUT of our public school system, it has been replaced by garbage, school shootings, lack of respect and an increased amount of self-centered kids who are in it for themselves and no one else for the most part. I was on the sideline to shoot a game earlier this year and was totally shocked by the amount of times the players used the F word. we can tolerate that, but gosh leave prayer out. There is a thing as respect and we need more of it. If you don't believe me, stand around a bunch of prep football players at a game. You have a right to believe in prayer or not, but don't criticize someone who does.

Dear god...not the F word?!?

Jesus forking Christ in a shirtstorm, what is this gosh darn planet coming to?

Seriously scribe, welcome to real life. If you don't like it, go cover homeschools. And you're right, we do need more respect. Namely, we need less people like you trying to cram Jesus down the throats of innocent folks like me. I'm glad you're all high on Christ and whatnot, but that tired "the world has gone to heck without prayer in schools" is the worst kind of uneducated, bumper-sticker based, back-of-the-Waffle House cultural argument that you can find today.

 

[Angola!]

This is something that's crossed my mind a few times this football season. After football games, when the whole team is huddling up for the team prayer and you're waiting for them to break so you can get quotes, has anyone ever joined in?
Sometimes I'll wander too close to the huddle and am close enough to grab a hand or put one on a shoulder when the prayer starts...

Do you ever wander too close to the sideline during the game and kinda, sorta, maybe feel like you should run a deep slant pattern? Or take a handoff?

Actually, I thought about running a pattern when I was covering a game and the quarterback threw the ball right to me although I was five yards behind the sideline.

So I did the next best thing. Ran the heck out of the way, forgot about the slight incline and fell on my face.

I feel your pain.
I ran like a baby once when it looked like I might get run over by some players and tripped and fell. Good times.
Of course, I'd rather trip and fall then get my leg snapped in half like a photographer did at our paper.

 

[ZummoSports]

I am a firm beliver in prayer, whether it's myself, the football team or the officials. Since prayer was taken OUT of our public school system, it has been replaced by garbage, school shootings, lack of respect and an increased amount of self-centered kids who are in it for themselves and no one else for the most part. I was on the sideline to shoot a game earlier this year and was totally shocked by the amount of times the players used the F word. we can tolerate that, but gosh leave prayer out. There is a thing as respect and we need more of it. If you don't believe me, stand around a bunch of prep football players at a game. You have a right to believe in prayer or not, but don't criticize someone who does.

The garbage would have been there whether prayer was taken out of public school or not.

 

[Kaylee]

I am a firm beliver in prayer, whether it's myself, the football team or the officials. Since prayer was taken OUT of our public school system, it has been replaced by garbage, school shootings, lack of respect and an increased amount of self-centered kids who are in it for themselves and no one else for the most part. I was on the sideline to shoot a game earlier this year and was totally shocked by the amount of times the players used the F word. we can tolerate that, but gosh leave prayer out. There is a thing as respect and we need more of it. If you don't believe me, stand around a bunch of prep football players at a game. You have a right to believe in prayer or not, but don't criticize someone who does.

The garbage would have been there whether prayer was taken out of public school or not.

Shhhhh...

It's so much easier to live in the opaque bubble of "how things used to be" rather than recognize social ills for the complex and multifaceted problems that they are.

 

[scribe21]

You are entitled to what you want to believe. And Kaylee, no, I am not a minister or trying to preach here. So, I guess a high school kid using the F word is appropiate at a sporting event? NOT in my book. Even a referee at the same game took note of the language, so there you go. The F word has NO place at sporting events, period. Zummo, can you tell me a major shooting incident at a high school before prayer was forbidden in schools? I challenge you to find them and post them here. It's not all the school's fault, though. It starts at home, but if it's not at home, where do these kids turn for positive influence? Just my opinion.

 

[Chi City 81]

You are entitled to what you want to believe. And Kaylee, no, I am not a minister or trying to preach here. So, I guess a high school kid using the F word is appropiate at a sporting event? NOT in my book. Even a referee at the same game took note of the language, so there you go. The F word has NO place at sporting events, period. Zummo, can you tell me a major shooting incident at a high school before prayer was forbidden in schools? I challenge you to find them and post them here. It's not all the school's fault, though. It starts at home, but if it's not at home, where do these kids turn for positive influence? Just my opinion.

So now you're blaming a lack of Jeebus for school shootings? News flash: Men have killed, raped and pillaged for 800 years or longer, all while shrouded in holy crosses and fully believing they had Jeebus' consent.

 

[buckweaver]

You are entitled to what you want to believe. And Kaylee, no, I am not a minister or trying to preach here. So, I guess a high school kid using the F word is appropiate at a sporting event? NOT in my book. Even a referee at the same game took note of the language, so there you go. The F word has NO place at sporting events, period. Zummo, can you tell me a major shooting incident at a high school before prayer was forbidden in schools? I challenge you to find them and post them here. It's not all the school's fault, though. It starts at home, but if it's not at home, where do these kids turn for positive influence? Just my opinion.

When was prayer "taken out" of public schools? Give me a year.
Was it before or after the bombings at the schoolhouse in Bath, Mich., in 1927?
Please be prepared to show your work. You will be tested on this material.
Use a No. 2 pencil only.

 

[Kaylee]

You are entitled to what you want to believe. And Kaylee, no, I am not a minister or trying to preach here. So, I guess a high school kid using the F word is appropiate at a sporting event? NOT in my book. Even a referee at the same game took note of the language, so there you go. The F word has NO place at sporting events, period. Zummo, can you tell me a major shooting incident at a high school before prayer was forbidden in schools? I challenge you to find them and post them here. It's not all the school's fault, though. It starts at home, but if it's not at home, where do these kids turn for positive influence? Just my opinion.

You're not trying to preach? Yammering on with some unsupportable rabble about how there were no school shootings back when we all prayed to Jeh-sus sounds like a sermon to me. Mainly because it lacks the facts and support structure to qualify for intellectual discourse.

And if kids dropping "fork" offends you, then I recommend you hie off to the wilds of Norway and build yourself an igloo upon some solitary ice drift. Kids have been using profanity for time immemorial, even (believe it or not) during whatever Norman Rockwell heyday you seem to have playing in your noggin.

I love you folks who believe the only way to "save" the youth of America is to outfit them with a Bible. Because, for you people, human beings can never be good enough as they are. Only when they start to think how you wish them to think, worship how you wish them to worship and - most importantly - exclude whom you exclude do they earn the right for you to declare them safe from moral harm.

How forking uneducated yet pretentious.

And how, I wonder, can America's young people be going down the toilet when just about every town I've ever lived in has big, opulent churches on every corner yet maybe only one or two underfunded youth centers?

Could kids possibly be losing their minds at an alarming rate because people like yourself continue to try to wedge your beliefs into everyone's lives, thus leaving every insecure and confused kid scared of what some book of old Jewish folklore has to say about them?

Know what would help our kids? Love. And, no, love does not come from Jesus. Love came well before Jesus, and it will be around long after Jesus is finally dead. Love doesn't judge people because they say "fork" at a sports event, love doesn't judge people just because they don't believe in a god and love sure as fork could care less whether or not someone says a prayer after some stupid prep football game.

 

[zeke12]

I'm just pissed that my perfectly good Jeebus Loves Me joke got buried.

That's A material, cats and kittens.

 

[Batman]

This is something that's crossed my mind a few times this football season. After football games, when the whole team is huddling up for the team prayer and you're waiting for them to break so you can get quotes, has anyone ever joined in?
Sometimes I'll wander too close to the huddle and am close enough to grab a hand or put one on a shoulder when the prayer starts...

Do you ever wander too close to the sideline during the game and kinda, sorta, maybe feel like you should run a deep slant pattern? Or take a handoff?

Not what I was saying. I usually try to stand a few feet back from the crowd, and more often than not stand abouthalfway between both huddles so I can run and grab whoever breaks first. But once in a while I'll be trying to hear a postgame speech by a coach and they'll wrap it up and launch into the prayer before I can get away. Those times, I'm surrounded by parents and players who are all holding hands, or putting hands on shoulders or some such, and I'm the only one not doing it.
I don't want to do it, because it looks like I'm joining in the celebration. And while I believe in God, I'm not exactly Charlie Church. But I will bow my head and be quiet out of respect to others around me (as I think up interview questions and how to write my story), and have a hard time grasping why others have such difficulty extending that courtesy.

That's exactly what you're saying. Just read the title you put on this thread. And if you don't think so, you're missing my larger point - which is you don't, ever, under any circumstances "JOIN IN ON" anything a team is doing.

Your original question has little to do with religion and everything to do with professionalism.

You observe. You report. End of story.

My bad. I think I misunderstood your first post. Thought you were criticizing and, since everyone else was getting up in arms, I followed the crowd. May God have mercy on my soul -- as long as it's not at midfield after a football game

 

[spnited]

Brilliant Kaylee, forking brilliant.