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Cheerleaders from one high school in Southern California were reportedly greeted with racist taunts from football fans at the other school, forcing the team to quit early, officials said.
Friday night’s nasty incident reportedly occurred shortly after halftime in the Inland Empire contest between the Valley View High School Eagles and the Temecula Valley High School Golden Bears.
The visiting Valley View cheerleaders, as usual, made their way to the sideline during intermission to meet their Temecula counterparts and watch the halftime show together, the halftime show said on Tuesday. Eagles cheerleader coach Kenya Williams on NBC News.
After the halftime show, the Valley View cheerleaders visited the snack stand and washroom, available only on the stadium side, and were reportedly greeted with hateful taunts.
“You have to go over there, so my daughters, as they walked through the stands, they heard the crowd making monkey noises,” said Williams, a counselor at Valley View. “It was like, ‘Did you hear that?’ ‘Yeah I heard that.’ “
Williams was back on the visitors sidelines and did not see the incident. But she learned about it when other Valley View students allegedly witnessed it and informed the advisor before her own team returned to their side.
The Valley View cheerleaders left early in the third quarter.
“My first instinct was, ‘Let me get the girls out of here,’” Williams said. “I didn’t know if they were going to follow the girls to the bus after the games were over. It was traumatic for them.”
Five of Valley View’s 17 cheerleaders are black.
The student body at Temecula Valley High School is nearly 49% white and less than 3% black, according to the latest state data from 2019-2020. Meanwhile, Valley View is over 13% black and 9.5% white, according to state data.
A spokeswoman for the Temecula Valley Unified School District said in a statement that the district was aware of “allegations of the use of racist language and racial slurs during a football game.” Friday.
“Our school district embraces diversity and strongly condemns hate speech and offensive, hateful or racial intolerance of any kind on athletic fields, in school buildings or anywhere in or outside of schools. school premises, “the statement continued. “We will hold anyone who used such language while representing one of our schools accountable for their words and actions.”
Officials from both districts said they were investigating in hopes of finding out who uttered the insults.
Valley View High School is in the Moreno Valley Unified School District, and Superintendent Martinrex Kedziora said in a statement that his staff “are working closely with the Temecula Valley Unified School District to investigate this unfortunate incident in order to to ensure that this situation is dealt with appropriately and on time. “
Students at Temecula Valley Hight School, located approximately 90 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles and 65 miles north of downtown San Diego, have come together to support the Valley Cheerleaders View Hight School Monday.
They carried signs such as “Hate has no home here” and “Hate must stop”.
“It hurts,” Tony Kingsberry, a black man whose 14-year-old daughter attends high school in Temecula Valley, told NBC Los Angeles on Monday. “And people just don’t understand this pain.”
A representative from the Southern Chapter of CIF, the governing body for school sports in much of southern California, said on Tuesday that his office was aware of Friday’s incident and was waiting for districts to make their findings.
Valley View’s next football game is scheduled for Thursday night, at home against Vista del Lago High School, and the school’s cheerleaders are going to be back on the sidelines, according to Williams.
Helene kwong contributed.
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