I (62F) have been raising my grandson Dominic (11M) since he was four years old, when his parents lost custody. Dominic has cerebral palsy affecting his left side – he walks with a slight limp and his left hand doesn’t close all the way. He is the most determined kid I have ever seen in my life. He has wanted to play on the Westbrook Middle School soccer team since he was eight years old. We’ve been working toward this for THREE YEARS.
I drove him to tryouts on a Tuesday afternoon in March. He’d been practicing in the backyard every single day since January. His pediatrician cleared him. His physical therapist wrote a letter. I had every piece of paper they asked for.
Coach Ferris – a man who I later found out has been coaching there for nine years – watched Dominic do the first two drills. Just the first two. Then he called Dominic off to the side, away from the other kids, and I saw them talking.
Dominic walked back to me with his cleats in his hand. He hadn’t taken them off. He was just holding them.
I went over to Coach Ferris myself.
He told me that Dominic was “a liability” and that the team’s insurance “didn’t cover situations like his.” He said it with this flat look on his face like he was reading off a script he’d used before. Like he’d done this before.
I asked him if he had any documentation of that insurance policy.
He said, “Ma’am, I think you know what I’m saying.”
I did know what he was saying. And Dominic was standing six feet away.
I got home and made some calls. My friend Patrice works in the district office, not in any official capacity, but she knew exactly who to contact. By Thursday I had a meeting request in with the school board’s ADA compliance coordinator. By Friday, I’d connected with a disability rights advocate named Gwen who said what Coach Ferris did had a name and a legal definition.
The school board meeting was the following Tuesday. I brought Dominic, I brought Gwen, I brought the pediatrician’s letter, the physical therapist’s letter, and one other thing – something Patrice had quietly passed along to me the day before.
When I pulled it out and put it on the table in front of the board, the principal looked at Coach Ferris.
Coach Ferris looked at his hands.
The Drive Home
I want to back up for a second. Because the meeting matters, but the drive home matters more.
Dominic is eleven. He’s not a kid who cries easily. He’s been through things that would knock most adults sideways and he just keeps going. His occupational therapist calls him “relentlessly forward-moving.” That’s exactly right. That’s exactly him.
But in the car on the way home from those tryouts, he didn’t say a word for the first four minutes. I know it was four minutes because I watched the clock on the dashboard. I didn’t push. I just drove.
Then he said, “He didn’t even watch me finish the drill.”
I said, “I know.”
He said, “I had the ball. I was doing it right.”
I said, “I know you were.”
He put his forehead against the window and we didn’t talk for the rest of the drive. He still had those cleats in his lap. He’d been wearing them since 2:45. He’d tied them himself, which takes him longer than other kids and he does it anyway, every time, without asking for help.
I pulled into the driveway and he went straight inside and up to his room. Didn’t slam the door. That almost made it worse.
I sat in the car for a while.
Then I went inside and I started making calls.
What “A Liability” Actually Means
Here’s what I knew going into this, and what Gwen confirmed on Friday: a school district cannot exclude a student from a school-sponsored activity because of a disability. That’s not a gray area. That’s Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. That’s the ADA applied to public schools. It has been the law for decades.
The “insurance doesn’t cover situations like his” line is one Coach Ferris apparently had ready. Gwen said she’d heard versions of it before. It sounds official. It sounds like something that can’t be argued with. It’s designed to make a parent feel like they’ve hit a wall.
It’s also, legally speaking, not a valid reason to exclude a child from tryouts.
When I called the school’s main office the day after tryouts to ask for a copy of the insurance policy Coach Ferris had referenced, the woman who answered put me on hold for six minutes and then told me someone would call me back. Nobody called me back.
That told me something.
Patrice, bless her, had been at that district office for eleven years. She knows where things are filed and she knows which questions to ask without making it look like she’s asking. She’s not a lawyer. She’s not a compliance officer. She’s just a woman who has worked in that building long enough to know how it runs.
She called me Thursday night and said, “Donna, I think you need to ask them about Marcus Webb.”
I asked her who Marcus Webb was.
She said, “He was a kid three years ago. Same situation, different coach. Same school.”
I said, “What happened to him?”
She was quiet for a second. Then she said, “Nothing. That’s what happened.”
What Was in the Folder
Patrice brought me a copy of the incident report from three years ago. Marcus Webb, then twelve years old, had been turned away from basketball tryouts. The coach at the time had cited “safety concerns.” Marcus’s mother had filed a complaint with the school principal. The principal had noted it, filed it, and the coach had finished out the season and retired the following year with a reception in the gym and a plaque.
Nothing happened.
The complaint was sitting in a file. Documented. Unresolved.
I made a copy of it. I put it in a folder with Dominic’s medical clearance, his physical therapist’s letter, a printed summary Gwen had prepared outlining the relevant statutes, and a written account I’d typed up myself of exactly what Coach Ferris said to me, word for word, with the time and location noted.
I also brought Dominic.
I want to be clear about why I brought him. Some people in my life thought I shouldn’t. My neighbor Carol said it might be hard for him to sit through. My sister said I was “making him part of something he doesn’t need to be part of.”
I disagree. He’s already part of it. He was part of it the second Coach Ferris called him off that field after two drills. Dominic asked to come. He asked me the night before if he could wear his cleats to the meeting. I said he could wear whatever he wanted.
He wore his cleats.
The Board Meeting
The room was smaller than I expected. Rectangular table, eight board members, the principal on one side, and then me and Gwen and Dominic on the other. Coach Ferris was there too, at the far end, in a collared shirt that looked like he’d ironed it that morning.
Gwen spoke first. She was calm, specific, and she did not raise her voice once. She laid out the legal framework in about seven minutes. She referenced Marcus Webb’s complaint without naming him. She said the district had prior notice of this pattern and had not addressed it.
The board chair, a woman named Sandra something, asked Coach Ferris if he’d like to respond.
He said the insurance concern was legitimate and that he’d been acting in the student’s best interest.
I put the folder on the table.
I slid Marcus Webb’s complaint across to the board chair.
I said, “This is the second time in three years this has happened at this school. The first time, nothing was done. I’d like to know what’s going to be done this time.”
Coach Ferris looked at his hands.
The principal looked at Coach Ferris.
Sandra looked at the folder for a long moment and then she looked at Dominic. He was sitting straight in his chair, cleats on, hands in his lap. His left hand, the one that doesn’t close all the way, was resting open on his knee.
She said, “Young man, do you still want to try out for this team?”
He said, “Yes ma’am.”
She wrote something down.
What Happened After
The board voted to allow Dominic a formal tryout, supervised, with the ADA coordinator present. They also voted to open an internal review of Coach Ferris’s conduct, specifically as it related to both incidents.
Gwen told me afterward that the review didn’t guarantee anything. These things move slowly. She’d seen them go nowhere before. She was being honest with me, which I appreciated.
The makeup tryout was scheduled for two weeks later. Different day, different field, same drills. The ADA coordinator stood at the edge of the field with a clipboard. Coach Ferris was not there. An assistant coach ran the session.
Dominic did every drill.
He wasn’t the fastest kid out there. He knew that going in. He’s been working with a physical therapist on his lateral movement for eight months and he’s made real progress, but he’s still an eleven-year-old with hemiplegia, and speed is what it is.
But he finished every single drill. He tracked the ball with his right foot the way he’d been practicing in the backyard since January. When he went for a header and missed it, he jogged back into position. He didn’t look at me once. Not once.
I was standing at the fence with my hands wrapped around the chain link and I was absolutely not going to cry in front of anyone, and then this kid next to me, maybe ten years old, some other kid’s little brother, said, “That guy’s good.” Just to no one in particular. Just as a fact.
I had to look up at the sky for a second.
Where We Are Now
Dominic made the team.
Not as a pity case. Not as an accommodation. He made the roster because the assistant coach who ran that tryout session said he showed good field awareness and that his work ethic was obvious.
Coach Ferris is still at the school pending the outcome of the review. I don’t know how that’s going to go. Gwen says it could result in a formal reprimand, mandatory training, or nothing. She’s seen all three outcomes. I’m not holding my breath on anything.
What I know is this: Dominic has practice on Thursdays and Saturdays. He comes home with grass stains on his knees. He’s made two friends on the team, a kid named Pete and another one everyone calls Rooster for reasons I have not been able to determine.
Last Thursday he came downstairs for breakfast with his shin guards already on.
I said, “Practice isn’t until four.”
He said, “I know.” And he ate his cereal.
That’s the kid we’re talking about. That’s who Coach Ferris looked at and said “liability.”
Am I the a**hole for going straight to the school board? No. I don’t think I am. But more than that, I’d do it again tomorrow. I’d do it faster.
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If this story hit you the way it hit the people who’ve already shared it, pass it on. Someone else out there needs to know they’re not out of moves.
For more stories about standing up for what’s right, check out what happened when I grabbed a stranger’s arm outside a coffee shop or when my stepdaughter’s teacher said I wasn’t qualified. And for a different kind of drama, see how my husband was checked into a hotel twelve minutes from our house.
