MARSHALL – The case of a school coach being suspended without pay back in late April has barely been a blip on the radar of mainstream media in the area.
And that might’ve been because of the nature of the incident that led up to it.
In this day and age of people getting in trouble one after another regarding interaction with children (as in teachers, coaches, religious leaders, employers), one would think that Meghan Arthur, an instructor and former coach at the high school in Marshall, might have found a better way to secure a teen girl’s breasts than to tape them down…but no.
That’s what Arthur was accused of doing, back in April at softball practice, when she determined that one of her players was jiggling a bit too much.
It’s reported that during practice, Arthur hollered at the girl for not wearing the appropriate undergarments to stop the jiggling of what the good Lord saw fit to give the teen, who isn’t quite 15 years of age yet.
So when the girl explained that she didn’t have anything with her for practice along the lines of a suggested sports bra, Arthur reportedly took the girl to the locker room and applied quite a bit of athletic tape around her torso (effectively, just her breasts) in order to keep her endowment from moving too much. The athletic tape – a self-adhesive/mostly fabric type of stuff that can wrap a strained ankle or wrist, or provide needed pressure to a muscle or grouping of muscles in order to boost support, isn’t very wide (it comes in different sizes, but what was used on the girl was the garden variety wrist-wrap size, about three to four inches wide. Arthur made several revolutions of the tape around the girl’s breasts on the outside of the bra, effectively creating a jiggle-free enclosure, and practice continued.
However, when the girl advised her parents of what happened, and the tape was pulled off, it of course did what any kind of adhesive tape does to skin, especially skin that’s been sweaty and cooled off, and of course it didn’t stay completely adhered to the teen’s bra, but instead stuck to exposed parts of the skin, damaging it and leaving welts as it was removed.
Incensed, the parents reported the incident, and on April 30, at a special meeting of Marshall Community School Unit District 2, the board of education held a closed session to address Arthur’s alleged actions.
After the closed session, the board voted to accept Arthur’s resignation as girls’ softball coach, and they gave her a five-and-a-half-day suspension without pay, but apparently kept her on as an instructor.
The parents of the girl could not be reached for comment, as the name hasn’t even been forwarded; Arthur has no publicly listed number. So it remains to be seen whether Arthur’s actions will lead the girl’s parents to file a lawsuit against Arthur, the district, or any number of other entities or individuals who could be held responsible…but in this day and age of people running for litigation as an answer to little but human foibles, the likelihood is a good one.
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