Following last year’s BYU-University of Cincinnati football game and just one week before the two universities meet again on the basketball court, eight Latter-day Saints authored an op-ed sharing what it was like to be the recipients of a derogatory chant.
The Feb. 26 article published in Cincinnati’s Enquirer which is titled, “UC and the Big 12 should stop bigotry, not stage it,” featured the personal experiences of Latter-day Saints after the Nov. 22 football game in which Cincinnati fans chanted “(expletive) the Mormons.”
‘There are little kids around’
William Nordquist is the assistant director of Intramural Sports and Events at the University of Cincinnati. He’s also the bishop of the Pleasant Ward for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Accompanied by his wife and three children, ages 9, 7 and 5, Nordquist expected a pleasant evening at the school’s final home football game last fall against BYU. But writing in the Cincinnati paper, Nordquist recalled the derogatory chant they heard many times.
“My young son — old enough to understand what the words meant — has responded with aggression ever since, experiencing ongoing trauma from what should have been a family outing,” he wrote.
That upsetting experience triggered patterns of yelling and screaming in his young son, Nordquist told Deseret News. “Children model what they see,” he said.
He made an appeal for the bigotry to stop.
Also in a Deseret News interview, Isabelle Shade, a first-year UC student, recalled seeing young families visiting the Ohio campus for the game. “A lot of those kids were confused and families were hurt, hearing these things being yelled at them,” she said.
“I felt embarrassed because my school treated them that way.”
A display of hostility
The authors wrote about the anti-religious nature of these chants. “These chants had nothing to do with football and everything to do with our religious affiliation,” they wrote.
Some of the authors (six of the eight authors of the op-ed were Latter-day Saint women) also spoke about the sexual overtones that can accompany the hurtful chant. They described observing or experiencing hostile comments of a sexual nature being directed at Latter-day Saint women (identified by their BYU fan gear).
Ellie Steeger is a Cincinnati adoption specialist and a BYU graduate who attended the game wearing royal blue. Throughout the day, she describes 15-25 hostile comments shouted at her.
“I can’t think of one that wasn’t sexual,” Steeger told Deseret News. “They were all sexual in nature.”
“There are so many things you’d expect people to make fun of,” she said. “But they honed in solely on sexuality. It was incredibly graphic.”
UC student Anabella Satterfield wrote in the commentary that her family “was called sexual slurs that I won’t repeat.”
Out of control
“When people get into big groups, things can get out of control,” Steeger said.
Dressed in Bearcat gear in the student section during the BYU-Cincinnati football game, A.J. Satterfield heard everything being directed at other Latter-day Saints. “They were talking the entire game about our religion — our church,” she said. “If BYU messed up, they’d say, ‘I guess Jesus doesn’t have your back,’ or ‘Joseph Smith isn’t real.’”
Isabelle Shade wrote, “I endured hatred all day. It was hatred towards our religion, not BYU, the school, or team.”
Satterfield wrote about leaving the game “feeling broken. I was so disgusted, I left before the game ended.”
Steeger said this has made her uncomfortable to go out in public on the UC campus. “I haven’t been to a sports game since.”
The authors wrote in the op-ed: “We are part of your community. We attend your schools. We play for your football teams. We sit next to you in lecture halls. We teach your classes. We work in your athletic departments. We lead your administrative offices. We serve your campus.”
Madisen Coburn told Deseret News that “smack talk at a game should be about how good we are at football or basketball. It should not have been anything to do with our religion, anything to do with our morals or our standards.”
“Smack talk is never gonna leave games, but there are lines, and those lines have very clearly been crossed.”