Everything is bigger in Texas, including their seventh graders.
A Texas Pee Wee league has ruled that 300-pound seventh grader Elijah Earnheart is too big to play in their league located in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He was informed this past weekend by the Mesquite Pee Wee Football Association that he is not allowed to play in the league due to his size endangering the safety of the other players.
The league, which has a 135-pound weight limit, informed Elijah that he can go to another league and play, but if he can’t join theirs; something the seventh grader said he wanted to do so he could be with his friends.
“I don’t want to play in school right now because it’s people that’s had experience and I want to get some experience first and then start playing,” Elijah Earnheart told the website. “I just want to play because my teammates are my friends — I know them. I don’t want to go play for somebody else I don’t know.”
12-year old Elijah Earnheart was told he couldn't play with his friends in a football league because he's too large to play according to the league.
Question No. 1: How can you do this to a little kid? We all grew up, and we all went to middle school. So we’re actively aware of how accepting people are at that age. So to blacklist a kid right out of the gate and taking away from him the chance to play sports, something we all did and bonded over, doesn’t seem right at all.
Question No. 2: Why is this kid 300-pounds. Well, he’s 6 feet tall so it’s not like he’s a bowling ball, but the league does have a point in terms of player safety. However, Earnheart’s coach claims that the league has plenty of kids over the weight limit. He claims that those kids are clearly marked with x’s on their helmets and can only play offensive line positions.
“If they’re over 135, they have to wear a symbol on their helmet, which is the X,” Marc Wright, Earnhardt’s coach said. “So if they’re an X-man they have to play offensive line, defensive line only.”
Ronnie Henderson, the president of the league, fired back at Wright saying that the coach knew the rules and willingly broke them and that can’t be acceptable behavior.
“The coach over there should have known this,” Henderson said. “He’s been told this. He’s been to our meetings. He knows this. I don’t know where the misunderstanding was. We hate it. I don’t like it for the kid or the parents.”
But politics aside here, we are left at the end of the day with a kid who just wants to play football with his friends and have a hobby outside of school. Earnhardt’s mother broken heartedly says she, along with coach Wright, will protest the decision by the league.
“For him to come home and just cry and go to his room and say, ‘I give up,’ I’m not going to let him give up,” she said. “This is his dream. This is what he wants to do. And I’m going to make it happen.”
