ASU chief OKs football tribute

Sticker wholly up to players

Arkansas State University will allow any football player who wishes to voluntarily place a NCAA-compliant sticker on his helmet to memorialize two deceased members of the football program, ASU officials said in a letter released Wednesday night.

The display of the stickers will be "totally voluntary and completely independent of university involvement," ASU System President Charles L. Welch and University Counsel Lucinda McDaniel wrote in a letter to Hiram Sasser, director of strategic litigation for the Plano, Texas-based Liberty Institute.

The university will not procure the stickers, purchase them or affix them to the helmets, Welch and McDaniel wrote in their letter.

Based on Sasser's conversation with McDaniel, "we understand that this will resolve the matter," Welch and McDaniel said.

The letter came two days after the Liberty Institute sent a letter to ASU asking the university to reverse its decision to remove the cross symbols on the helmet decals to memorialize the two deceased football program members.

ASU turned Sasser's letter over to the office of state Attorney General Dustin McDaniel.

Sasser alleged in his letter that ASU violated the free speech clause and establishment clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

But Welch and Lucinda McDaniel maintained that Sasser's "contentions are based on a faulty understanding of the facts.

"Once the facts are properly explained, it will be clear that the decals on ASU football helmets were not student speech. Rather the decals constituted government speech. Further, the decals were modified from their original form precisely to avoid violating the establishment clause," they wrote.

The dispute over the decals prompted gubernatorial candidates Asa Hutchinson and Mike Ross earlier Wednesday to side with the ASU students who want to have cross symbols on helmet decals memorializing their two former colleagues.

After speaking to the Political Animals Club in Little Rock, Hutchinson told reporters, "I share the concern of the students that were trying to do something to remember their friends and fellow competitors that lost their lives and that's what students do and that's how they wanted to remember and the students ought to have the freedom to do that.

"I am not in a position to tell ASU what they should do. I hope to have a conversation at some point," said Hutchinson, an attorney. "I know they are relying upon legal counsel.

"But I think they need to look at that very carefully because as long as it is student-led and student-initiated, then my understanding is those are constitutional and permissible actions and free speech," he said.

Ross said later in a written statement, "I stand squarely behind the students who simply want to place a cross on their helmet to express their faith and honor two fellow members of their football program who recently died."

Welch and McDaniel said in their letter that 15 players from the ASU football team known as head Coach Blake Anderson's Leadership Council and the entire football coaching staff jointly decided to memorialize former player Markel Owens and former team manager Barry Weyer.

Owens died in January of a gunshot wound in his hometown of Jackson, Tenn; Weyer died in June in a car accident.

"The head football coach -- not the football players as your letter indicates -- designed the memorial, which was a white cross bearing the initials of the two deceased students at opposite ends of the horizontal bar of the cross," Welch and McDaniel wrote in their letter to Sasser.

After the head coach designed the cross, he showed it to the members of coaching staff and Leadership Council, and they jointly approved the memorial and decided to place it on the helmets of all players, Welch and McDaniel said. They also placed an order for the appropriate number of decals to be paid for with public funds from the team's equipment fund.

"Contrary to your letter, the students themselves did not affix the stickers to their helmets," Welch and McDaniel wrote. "Rather, the stickers were affixed to the football helmets in two stages."

They said all the coaches and players at the end of one practice held a team ceremony in honor of the two former students, at which time a single decal was affixed to a single helmet. All the remaining officially-designed and publicly-funded decals were affixed to the helmets by the team's equipment managers.

They said that's "in a stark contrast to the misinformation contained in [Sasser's] letter stating that the 'students designed the helmet sticker,' that 'each teammate affixed the sticker to his helmet' and that the 'stickers were designed and adopted by students on their own.'"

The sticker idea originated among the coaches and the coaches' group of players on the Leadership Council and the sticker was designed by the head coach, intended to be purchased with public funds and affixed to the helmets by the team's equipment managers, they said.

"When this was brought to the attention of ASU's administrative and legal officials, the decals were modified so that they were a single horizontal bar that continues to bear the initials of the former students. This was done ... to avoid the establishment clause concerns."

Anderson said Wednesday that the helmet sticker was never intended to be a religious statement.

"I'm a Christian and I am very open about my faith, but that was nothing I would ever want to force on the team," the first-year head coach said. "When this whole thing developed the way it did, it kind of made me take a step back and make sure I wasn't forcing anything on anybody."

Information for this report was provided by Troy Schulte of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Metro on 09/18/2014

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