If you take a knee in Texas, you better be in a church. “A coach kicked two Texan high school football players off of the team after the players protested during the national anthem Friday,” Rob Shimshock reported in The Daily Caller on September 30, 2017. “Senior Larry McCullough knelt and sophomore Cedric Ingram-Lewis put his fist up in the air during the national anthem before Victory & Praise Christian Academy’s football game, reported the Houston Chronicle.”
“Ronnie Mitchem, the team’s coach and pastor, kicked them off the team directly afterwards.”
“I don’t have any problem with those young men,” Mitchem said. “We’ve had a good relationship.”
“They chose to do that and they had to pay for the consequences.”
Shimshock wrote that “Mitchem, a former Marine, had previously told the school’s players that he did not want them to kneel during the anthem, believing that the action offends veterans and distracts rather than calls attention to issues.”
