Last Thursday, the executive board of the La Cañada Gladiator Football program voted to cut 7-year-old David Vardanian from the Gremlins' final roster.
Ordinarily, such a vote is not noteworthy. The San Gabriel Valley Junior All-American Football Conference has a roster limit for each team, and it is sometimes necessary to cut a few players in order to meet that limit. Prospective players have been cut before. There will be cuts in the future.
This cut was different.
As a result of the vote, at least one board member and two coaches resigned from the program. A number of parents pulled their kids off the team. Several other players resigned in protest, led by David's older brother and 5-year veteran of the program, Marty.
What caused such a stir over a simple roster cut? As with many of life's questions, there is no clear answer.
The board's official position is that David was cut because he was a "safety risk," the term used for a player too weak to protect himself on the field of play. This is the only basis for which a La Cañada resident can be cut from the team.
Others say that it was petty politics and scheming that brought about David's fate.
Less than a week earlier, David's father, Tony, an assistant coach of the Pee-Wee division team, had openly expressed concern for the safety of one of the players on the team, who just so happened to be the son of one of the other coaches, who in turn was a close friend of the athletic director.
Still others believe the clamor was initiated by an unwritten practice in other junior football programs possibly rearing its ugly head here at home. The practice is called "weeding out." Here's how it works: Players who are designated to be cut are given an unusually high number of repetitions, in high-contact positions against the strongest hitters on the team. The net result is that these kids, with broken spirits if not broken bones, quit prior to being voted off.
While all of these theories may be true, or all false, there is another reason for the uproar, one that now holds the majority view among those who have protested this decision.
That reason is David himself. His nickname is "Big D." That name has nothing to do with his physical attributes.
