Extreme volleyball practice leaves girls with blistered hands; parent calls for coach to resign

ALLEGHENY COUNTY, Pa. — Near record temperatures have school districts taking extra precautions for students, but parents said one sports coach did the opposite — putting their kids at risk and causing injuries in the extreme heat.

“It’s child abuse, it basically is child abuse that’s the way I see it,” said Will Safran, a Woodland Hills parent.

It’s an outcry from a Woodland Hills father after his sophomore daughter came home from volleyball practice with hands cut and blistered.

“When I picked my daughter up her and her best friend showed me their hands — their broken blisters — still blisters all black and dirt under the blisters,” Safran said.

Safran said it happened after the coach, who is not a district employee, had the team do an entire lap of burpees and a lap of bear crawls in the head of the day on Monday.

“It was 95 degrees. Their hands are directly on the ground, on the rough ground. All the girls were getting cuts and blisters on their hands and when they tried to ask to stop or do it in the grass, they said ‘if you ask again you will get another lap,’” Safran said.

Safran is outraged that a coach who’s only been on the job a month would treat high schoolers to this level of intensity. He has reported it to the district and is calling for the coach to be fired.

“I just don’t want her to be a coach again, really that’s it, it’s not your job. That’s not the way you treat people,” Safran said.

The district said it is aware and investigating, but the matter is confidential. Practice on Tuesday was canceled as the parents meet to get answers.

“This isn’t the Army these are just little girls,” Safran said.

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