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The Freedom From Religion Foundation is protesting an Ohio cross-country coach’s violation of the First Amendment right of student-athletes to be free from religious indoctrination.

A concerned district parent has informed the state/church watchdog that a cross-country coach at Lake Middle High School (Uniontown, Ohio) has been leading her team in prayer before meets. The coach reportedly told the team, “Let’s continue to pray before every meet like last year.” FFRF additionally learned that coach-led prayer is common across sports teams in the Lake Local Schools system. FFRF’s complainant reported that they and their child felt helpless, awkward and embarrassed that the child was forced to either pray against their own beliefs or risk ostracizing themselves from the team by stepping away from the illegal prayer.

FFRF has reached out to the school district to advocate for the right of students to be free from school-sponsored religious practices.

“Coaches are free to express their religious beliefs however they wish outside of their roles as public school coaches, but they cannot use their position to foist their personal religious beliefs onto students or encourage students to pray,” FFRF Anne Nicol Gaylor Legal Fellow Kyle J. Steinberg has written to Superintendent Brett Yeagley. 

Student-athletes have the First Amendment right to be free from religious indoctrination when participating in their public school’s athletics program. Here, the coach has clearly crossed the constitutional line by pressuring them into engaging in prayer while acting in her official capacity as a district employee. 

Student-athletes are especially susceptible to coercion, FFRF emphasizes. Students know that their coaches control their positions on the team, including who runs each race. When a coach directs students to participate in a prayer, they will no doubt feel that participating in that prayer is essential to pleasing their coach and being viewed as a team player. It is unrealistic and unconstitutional to expect student-athletes to choose between allowing their constitutional rights to be violated to maintain good standing in the eyes of their coach and peers or openly dissenting at the risk of retaliation from their coach and teammates. By promoting religion, the coach isolates nearly half of Generation Z members (those born after 1996) who are nonreligious, which includes the complainant’s child.

FFRF asserts that the district employees have an obligation not to promote religion in any official capacity, and as such, Lake Local Schools must take action to ensure this harmful practice comes to an end.

“Coaches may not coerce their athletes into praying to play in district sports,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “This is a blatant violation of the Constitution, a clear abuse of power from the coach and a strong case for why infusing religion into school sports is always a losing practice.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with over 42,000 members and several chapters across the country, including more than 1,100 members and two chapters in Ohio. Its purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.

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