Time to Grieve, Not Point Fingers
The death of Spring Hill football player Nathan Stiles has hit this community hard.
It seems like everywhere you go, from the schools to the grocery store, people are talking about it.
From everything we have heard, Nathan was a great young man. Well liked and respected in Spring Hill. We have heard about him being a talented musician and how strong his faith was.
Osawatomie will always be connected with this tragedy. Hundreds of people were at the game Thursday night. Kids stood on the track and took pictures of the helicopter landing and of Nathan being taken to the hospital. At that point, no one knew how badly he was hurt.
Unfortunately, some kids decided to use Nathan’s death to harass some of the members of the football team. Friday, there was talk of them being murderers. Many of the players chose to leave school to deal with their grief privately.
This is a time when the community needs to come together and support this team and the players. Being on the field and competing in a football game takes courage. You hit and you get hit. Nothing happened Thursday night out of the ordinary. There were no hits that were outside the boundaries of a normal football game.
Seth Jones has been targeted because he had a big hit late in the second quarter near the Spring Hill sidelines. But that hit was not on Nathan, he had already left the game before that.
What happened on the field was an accident. It was a tragedy to be sure, seeing a promising young life cut short.
Let’s stop pointing fingers and start supporting these kids, both the football team and the students. Many are dealing with a death for the first time. And when it happens to a peer it’s even harder to deal with.
There are two communities hurting right now. We in Osawatomie are just feeling a small part of the pain that Spring Hill is feeling. But we mourn with them.
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