Last week’s “Word on the Street” was embarrassing and degrading to not only our football team, but also to our university as a whole. (It “sucked ass.”) The entire idea behind a school newspaper is to keep the students of the university updated on things going on around campus and to positively promote clubs and organizations or in this case, athletics. Being a fellow athlete, I’m constantly up at the field house. I know a little bit about what goes on behind the scenes. I know the hours the football team puts in, whether it be in the meetings or practices they have every single day of the week. They don’t just have school work and fraternity meetings to attend. When someone says that our football team “sucks ass”, it not only affects the players on the football team, but it also affects our entire athletic program and the way in which our university is viewed. If I was a parent of a prospective student and I just happened to pick up Thursday’s copy of The Houstonian, I would definitely not want my child to come here. Here at Sam Houston we have the shallow, one-dimensional student that claims that our football team “sucks ass” and then we have the classy and well-respected Houstonian with the veracity to publish it. Granted our football team may not have the best record this year, every team has their ups and downs. Anyone who has ever been on a real team knows this. To put an end to my rant, I encourage the school newspaper to be a little bit more supportive of our athletic teams and campus programs and to have a little more class and decency than what was displayed in Thursday’s paper. And to the guy and the girl that made the comments for the “Word on the Street”, I think you two messed with the wrong group of people.
-Brett Heitmiller