The Beachwood Bison football team traveled to Brooklyn for a summit with the Hurricanes on Tuesday, Sept. 24, three days prior to their scheduled Friday night game at Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Superintendent Dr. Ted Caleris planned the summit as a response to controversy during last year’s game, when the Hurricanes used a ‘Nazi’ blitz call and other offensive language. 

Tom Burton from WeEmpower, LLC. led the summit, where they reflected on last year’s events, engaged in ice breaker activities and learned ways to combat this behavior and how to adjust to adversity. 

 “I thought it was great,” Beachwood Athletic Director Ryan Peters said. “I was very impressed that Brooklyn reached out to us and took the time and effort to put something together to help them.”  

Last year’s incident occurred days before Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism. The incident heightened emotions for Beachwood’s large Jewish community. Brooklyn’s football coach resigned within days of the incident. 

This was not the first time Beachwood student-athletes had been subjected to antisemitic and racist speech. In 2019, parents told News 5 that students heard “white power” chants and saw confederate flags during a game at Grand Valley, according to News 5 Cleveland.

Since last fall, the Brooklyn school district has had other programming to educate students about antisemitism, including having a Holocaust survivor speak to students in February.  

“I thought the kids did a great job,” Peters said. “The facilitator did a really nice job as well. Brooklyn truly stepped up and understood what happened in the past was not acceptable and should never be repeated.”

 Last year’s incident at Brooklyn caused tension for both teams and resulted in a lot of anger during the game. 

After the incident, Beachwood Schools worked closely with the Chagrin Valley Conference last year to address antisemitism and racial slurs during athletic events. 

According to Peters, some of the players were skeptical about the summit. 

“I talked to a bunch of the kids,” he said. “There was some trepidation, a little nervousness…” he said.  “[Players asked] Why are we going there? We don’t even like these guys… we’re not sure about these guys.” 

Peters himself was uncertain before the event. 

“I don’t know, [I asked myself] is this going to go well? Is it not going to go well?” he said.

Ultimately, though, he was pleased with the outcome. 

“I think we did a really good thing,” he said. “They came together, they got to know each other, they were exchanging Instagram and phone numbers, and I thought that was good.”

“I think that is a part of sports, and sometimes bad things can be fixed,” he added. “Getting together after a tragic event can often bring people together and allow for issues to be resolved.” 

Peters’ goal for the summit was to avoid other negative incidents during this year’s game.  

“I think it could have been much more heated,” he said. “It was a close game, which we should have won, but I think things went really well.” 

“There were some late hits later on in the game…  but, it could have been way worse,” he added.

Additionally, the Brooklyn team made shirts for the Bison that read “BIGGER THAN THE GAME.” 

“I thought [that] was a really classy act,” Peters said.

Senior Avi Saidel was one of the Beachwood football players who attended the summit. He felt it was awkward getting to know the players from the other team right before playing them. 

“We didn’t know each other, and there was still tension because of last year,” he said.

Senior Ori Balkan agreed. 

“Before the summit, I didn’t think the Brooklyn guys would care about anything,” he said. “It was super awkward at first. It was all quiet and we didn’t know what to say.”

Although Saidel enjoyed meeting the players from the Brooklyn team, he felt that the summit focused more on getting to know people rather than directly addressing the issues from last year’s game. 

Balkan agreed. 

“The speaker didn’t talk about last year’s events very much,” he said. “That was the weirdest part about it; they mentioned last year’s events super vaguely and only one time, then moved onto random icebreakers.”

Nonetheless, many Beachwood players believed the idea of this summit had great potential to be meaningful but felt it could have been executed more effectively if it were directed more at the root cause of last year’s conflict.  

According to Peters, the event helped resolve tension between the Bisons of Beachwood and the Brooklyn Hurricanes.