Peabody’s postgame celebration leads to apology
A series of posts and rumors on social media led to Peabody’s head football coach Shane Jacobs writing an open letter on Monday morning. The first year coach addressed the speculation of Union City’s locker room being vandalized after the Golden Tide ended their 28-game winning streak on Friday. Below is the letter. Peabody Supporters, We would like to thank you all for the tremendous support shown Friday night for our kids. They prepared hard all week and demonstrated the tenacity and grit that is needed to win a game such as Friday night. What a win for our team, our town, and our community! It truly was a group effort that involved a lot of people pulling in the same direction. As many have seen or heard, our guys demonstrated poor judgment in terms of how we celebrated the win in the locker room. I am overwhelmingly appalled and embarrassed for our actions. For this, words cannot express the regret I have for the situation. I accept full responsibility for the actions shown postgame Friday night. As a staff, we should have done a better job of preparing the players for the emotions that would inevitably be swirling after a big game, win or lose. We focused a lot on the emotions during the game, stressing the importance of “Do not get caught up in the game. Just play the game.” I wish we would have focused on postgame emotions as well. I am sincerely sorry for the way we represented ourselves. This is a teachable moment for our guys and will be treated as such. I love every single kid on this team. I am disappointed in their actions, but I am not disappointed in them. They have won some very big games and represented this town well with pride, passion and respect. Please see this as a small blip that will soon pass. Please trust that this matter will be handled internally and will not be an issue moving forward. Again, my deepest apologies for the postgame actions shown Friday night. I am sending our apologies to Union City as well. They are a class program and showed it once again Friday night. We will move forward from this with some lessons learned and we will be the team for which this town may enjoy cheering. Sincerely and with deepest regrets, Shane Jacobs
