Krause: Patience is needed when examining charges against Chernovetz

Doug Chernovetz has had a bad week, and it’s difficult to say how much of it is self-induced, and how much of it has to do with forces beyond his control.For those who haven’t heard yet, Chernovetz was suspended for the first two games of the 2008 Marblehead High football season for chewing tobacco in front of his players. And while would seem to be the absolute most ridiculous thing to some, we need to bear in mind that it’s a state athletic association rule to which all student-athletes are held.It’s part of the state’s chemical health policy that a first-time offender, according to the latest handbook, “becomes ineligible for the next consecutive interscholastic contests totaling 25 percent of all interscholastic contests in that sport.” The rule goes on to say that the penalty cannot exceed 25 percent.That may sound like a mouthful, so, in English, it means that if you play 20 games in a season, and you get caught violating this rule, you sit out five games. If you play 10 or 11 – as most football teams do – you cannot sit out more than two games, because three out of 11 comes out to more than 25 percent.It’s also worth noting that the rule specifically includes coaches, and it specifically stipulates that there are no exceptions, even if the offending student/coach is in a treatment program.So from that standpoint, the Marblehead administration is abiding by an ironclad rule that the MIAA has put in place. Ergo, the people on all those blogs who find fault with it, and feel qualified to criticize the administration over it, can just shut up.Those are the nuts and bolts of the issue. However, this goes deeper. And it’s this aspect of the issue that’s troubling.The Marblehead administration wanted to keep this suspension low-key, which is admirable. The facts only came to light after The Item (and other papers) received a fax from a parent – that read like a press release – that not only announced the suspension but presented a laundry list of unsubstantiated accusations that made chewing tobacco seem like a walk in the park by comparison.The parent’s name is Michael Morris, and his name and picture have been plastered all over the place (but not here, until today). Since we’re not in the business of slandering and libeling people, we refrained from getting into that part of it. However, another newspaper has taken this story and run with it, so I guess it needs to be addressed.This, obviously, is case of a very unhappy parent (or perhaps group of parents, with Morris as its spokesman) who wants Chernovetz run out of town. Of course, this is hardly unique in Marblehead, where running the coach out of town seems to be a long-held town policy.So now, aside from having his name dragged through the mud because of this mortal sin of chewing tobacco, Chernovetz stands accused of swearing at his players, uttering racially-insensitive remarks, and God knows what else. Naturally, all these charges are subjective, difficult to prove, and will only serve, as the weeks and months pass, to weaken Chernovetz’ influence over his players.I would submit that the good people in Marblehead simply do not know what they want. They’ve run just about every football coach since Alex Kulevich out of town (some have lasted longer than others), and that includes Bruce Jordan, who gave the town some of the best years it’s had since the good old days of the ’50s and ’60s.This whole thing reminds me of the incident a few years ago when parents in Saugus threatened to boycott the football season if the school didn’t fire Dean Sacca as its football coach. Sacca resigned before the parents had a chance to make good on this threat, but it would have been interesting to see what would have happened had he (and the town) had said “Go ahead!” Believe me, the program would have been better off.It sounds to me as if the parent (or parents) in question threw as many charges as they could against the wall ? and chewing tobacco was the only one that stuck. It also