Head coaches are always worried about headlines this time of year because outside of those handful of ones about spring practice, chances are high that if somebody is writing about the program it’s because somebody did something wrong. Thanks to an assist from Reddit of all places though, that’s exactly what new Appalachian State head coach Eli Drinkwitz is dealing with.
As detailed by the Winston-Salem Journal, a video surfaced on the social media site in the AppState sub-reddit that apparently shows several football players involved in a fight at a house party. As one could guess from a thread labeled ‘St. Patrick’s day football team scuffle,’ this poses a bit of a discipline issue for the program and several players have been suspended this week as a result.
“We are aware of an incident involving our student-athletes,” a statement provided by the school read. “We are proactively handling matters, with some student-athletes being suspended from team activities pending further investigation of facts and details.”
The university is still trying to sort out what happened and the exact level of involvement from all the players but has gone ahead and suspended those involved from the Mountaineers football team. While the names of those suspended were not released by the school, they did confirm only that it was fewer than five players who will be away from the program until a final punishment is decided.
This probably isn’t the way that Drinkwitz imagined his first spring practice going with the Mountaineers but such is life for one of the Sun Belt’s top teams.