Burkey said school officials first heard rumors Monday evening that new Head Coach Matt Gehrig had gone on a rampage during halftime of last Friday's game at Crystal Lake South, smashed up lockers, punched a player in the face, and made the team do pushups in goose droppings.
Tuesday as the rumors spread, Burkey said administrators began to talk to coaches and players and D155 officials to find out what, if anything, had actually gone on at the game. Wednesday Burkey said they couldn't find anything like the rumors but weren't done investigating.
FEN had picked up the rumors Monday night, too, but couldn't find anything to support them, either. Crystal Lake police had no reports of any incident at the game. Nor, just in case, did Huntley PD. Larkin High School officials in Elgin where Gehrig was head coach last year said there'd been no complaints during his tenure. Most tellingly, at a private meeting of eight team parents at a Huntley home Tuesday night, no one knew the name of the kid who was supposed to have been punched or of anyone who saw anything like it. "I think it's BS," one father told FEN.
Burkey withheld judgement until Friday, though, when HHS Principal David Johnson who conducted most of the investigation finally reported, "What was being alleged didn't happen."
Johnson said Gehrig was certainly upset at halftime as the Raiders were heading for another big loss. "He was loud and probably said some things that could have been said in a better way," said Johnson. If he banged lockers it wasn't hard enough to damage them. On the "goose poop", Johnson said Gehrig had the team run scrimmages after their loss. "There was probably some goose droppings there," he said. "There's goose poop everywhere."
Johnson and Burkey said they'd counseled Gehrig to be more circumspect, "especially after losing four games." The Raiders broke their losing streak Friday night, incidentally, trouncing Dundee-Crown 33 to 14.
In the pic: It looked like business as usual after school Tuesday at Huntley Raiders' practice.
