Conflict emerges at basketball game against Beverly

Violence erupted at Samo’s basketball game against Beverly Hills High School on Fri., Jan. 23, in which Beverly defeated Samo.Fighting among Samo and Beverly students began outside the blacktop basketball courts as students left the North Gym.According to Kuba Preis (’15), a student who witnessed the fight directly, the crowd spilled out of the gym onto the blacktop basketball courts outside, where taunting and jeering led to physical altercations between a number of Samo students and Beverly students. As the fighting intensified, a crowd began to form.

The initial fighting was broken up by H-house Principal Leslie Wells, who helped pull students apart from each other.Jacob Soroudi (’15) also saw the fight break out after he attended the game. He said that despite the initial fight getting broken up, the mob of students had formed soon after, this mob would follow some of the quarrelsome Beverly students to the Civic Center parking lot.“The Beverly kids got into their Mercedes Sedan for safety,” Soroudi said. “However, a number of students in the crowd began kicking the car. They managed to kick out a headlight. Everyone pretty much left after the Beverly students drove off.”

According to Preis, tension between Samo and Beverly students was escalating throughout the game. Preis believes that this tension is the result of the stereotype of Beverly students that permeates Samo.“I’m not saying all [Beverly] kids act like this, but the way they are perceived at Samo is that they’re kind of snobby, very rich and that they don’t play fair,” Preis said.Samo’s rivalry with Beverly is age -old, which begs the question: would the fighting still have occurred if the same situation had happened with a different school?

“I think if the same thing had happened with a different school like Culver [City High School] there still would have been a fight,” Preis said. “I don’t know if tensions would have escalated to the extent that they did if we were playing a team like Culver. While I can’t say for sure that what happened on Friday was because of our animosity with Beverly, I do think it contributed.”Principal Eva Mayoral made an announcement on the Public Announcement system at the end of fourth period on Mon., Jan 26 concerning the events after the basketball game. She congratulated Samo on the intensity of the fans and players at the game, but expressed her disappointment about the lack of a

standard of sportsmanship that is dictated in Samo’s Code of Honor.Wells expressed similar emotions to Mayoral. He said that participating in California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) is about competing with honor, a notion that applies to both the players and the fans.“Whether we had won or lost, our response afterwards should always be positive, because every single person from Beverly is a human being, and to treat them differently, to belittle, to taunt them is not a very human-like thing to do,” Wells said. “That saddens me because I know that we’re better than that.”cdebeus@thesamohi.com