Two Texas high school football players who were filmed slamming a referee to the ground during a game in San Antonio earlier this month spoke for the first time on Friday of their “great regret” – but pointed the finger of blame at their secondary coach, claiming: “He told us to do what we did.”
Victor Rojas and Michael Moreno came from behind to knock Robert Watts to the ground during a game between John Jay high school and Marble Falls on 4 September. The duo were suspended by the school, but the players said they were following orders from coach Mack Breed, who claimed Watts had been using racial slurs and “needed to pay the price”. According to the players, Breed told them: “You need to hit him.”
The high school pair went on Good Morning America on Friday to apologise for what Moreno called “one of my biggest regrets”.
“I’m ready to face my consequences,” Moreno, 17, said. “I am greatly sorry for this and I regret it greatly. I hope people can change their minds about us and the consequences.
“Everyone sees me as this thug or gangster: ‘I did this because I’m a bad guy.’ That’s not who I am,” Moreno, an aspiring aerospace engineer, said. “Underneath the helmet and the pads, I’m really a great kid.”
Rojas, a sophomore, slammed Watts in the back and Moreno, a senior, dived into him on the ground, and afterwards the players told the school district they felt “a lot of frustration” over a series of bad calls by the referees during the game.
But Rojas also said he heard Watts call a black student the n-word and claimed he had said to a Spanish student: “Speak English. This is America.”
Watts’s attorney, however, rejected the allegations of racism and said the teens were “flat out lying”. Watts is considering legal action.
Breed, a 29-year-old secondary coach at John Jay high school in San Antonio, has been placed on administrative leave. He allegedly told players “that guy needs to pay for cheating us” during the game, but has not publicly commented on the allegations.
Breed is black. Watts is white. Moreno and Rojas are both Latino.
The incident is now being investigated by the Northside independent school district, which called the matter “disturbing”, along with the Texas Association of Sports Officials and the Texas University Interscholastic League. Local police are also investigating and the players could face criminal charges.
Moreno said of Breed: “His emotions just got mixed into it. He told us to do what we did.”
Wayne Elliott, the secretary of the Austin Football Officials Association, told ESPN that Watts, who is from Austin, is “very upset” and wants to press charges.
“The first thing we want is that those two kids never play football again,” Elliott said.
Rojas and Moreno and their attorney, Jesse Hernandez, hope the public and officials will go easy on them. They have already been suspended for three days and had to attend an alternative school for a week.
Moreno has learned “you can’t just do that because of something you were told”. But he said he went through with the tackle because he trusted Breed as a “grownup”.
