You laced up your cleats because you wanted to play. You trusted the adults to give you a fair shot—to compete, to grow, to chase the dream of playing on Friday nights and maybe one day Saturdays. That trust was broken. Not by you, but by the people who were supposed to protect you.
The collapse of Bishop Montgomery’s 2025 football season wasn’t about effort or talent. It was about shortcuts and schemes. More than twenty transfers, with five ruled ineligible for falsified paperwork, brought down an entire program. The now-infamous booster Brett Steigh openly admitted in a podcast interview that he paid parents and players at not just Bishop Montgomery, but also Narbonne and St. Bernard. He called his motives altruistic. Maybe that’s true. Maybe not. What’s undeniable is that the adults around you—coaches, boosters, administrators—let ambition override integrity.
And you paid the price. The season you trained for was erased. The reputations of your school and teammates now carry a stigma you never asked for. The win-at-all-costs mindset left scars that no forfeit or firing can fully repair.
It forces us to ask: Why do we send our kids to school? Why do we send them to college? It isn’t to pad win columns or chase trophies—it’s to learn, to mature, to prepare for the future. When winning trumps teaching, the system itself becomes broken.
There’s another truth no one wants to say out loud:
“Everybody is doing it.” As a kid, if I heard it once I heard it a thousand times—if all your friends were jumping off a bridge, would you do it too? High school football has jumped. “Everybody is doing it.” Cheating, that is. Some programs rationalize by claiming they only “turn a blind eye” to toes in the grey.
Others are full-throated, handing out financial support and inducements like recruiting perks. But whether you whisper or shout, it’s still the same fall.
The adults owe you more. They owe you honesty, accountability, and a commitment to your development as both athletes and young men. They owe you a football program built on fair play and respect, not backroom deals and booster paydays.
So here’s the message: don’t let this scandal define you. Your desire to play is pure. Your effort is real. Let this moment fuel a demand for change, because high school sports should be about opportunity, not exploitation.
The adults failed you this time. But that doesn’t mean you have to fail yourselves.
