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It cost MHS a football game, but everyone who pays taxes, everyone who has a kid in the local school system and everyone who understands right from wrong should applaud Middletown High School for the integrity of its football coaching staff.
Yeah, the Blue Dragons lost a game and likely won't be playing in any postseason games, but because of what Marszalek and assistant coaches Jim Greco, Sandy Tucci and Mark Fong did, MHS showed it is a championship school.
Several years ago, Xavier High, when faced with a similar situation, did exactly the same thing. It refused to allow players on a basketball team that was a lock -- an absolute lock -- to win the Class LL basketball championship to play after they violated the school's no drinking policy.
Xavier lost a semifinal state tournament game and was eliminated and gone was its chance to win a state title. Xavier hasn't come close since. But the folks at Xavier did what was right.
Middletown, which would have been in the hunt for a playoff berth in Class MM had it won Saturday, forfeited that chance by suspending three of its best players. It is not a matter of public record what they did, but I can say they did not break a law, did not say or do anything immoral or disruptive or harmful. And these suspensions came on top of the loss of Cole McDaniel, a team captain who was injured.
They violated a team rule, the exact kind of which Marszalek refused to disclose publicly.
Middletown lost, but the kids who played for MHS Saturday played as hard as they could. Marszalek was forced to completely scrap his game plan, a plan worked out after scouting Avon and a plan he knew would be successful.
He asked kids on three hours notice to play positions with which they were not familiar. A missing player has a ripple effect. Another kid has to move to another position. Miss three kids (actually four with the injured McDaniel), especially kids who play both offense and defense, and now there are eight positions to fill.
Marszalek asked Vincent Jordan, his quarterback and as nice a kid as you'll ever meet, to do everything but line the field.
He asked Corey Wright, a kid who lost his starting job two weeks ago but a kid who never pouted or complained, to take the place at running back of one of the suspended kids. Wright ran as if he hadn't skipped a beat and in Marszalek's words, showed he had continued to work hard in practice and knew what he had to do.
Marszalek asked Hamp Watson, another terrific kid and a young man from a longtime Middletown family and whose dad and uncles were stickout athletes at MHS, to run the ball twice as much as he has all year. And there were no running backs to give either of them a rest.
At the end of the game Marszalek talked to his kids. These conversations are tacitly off the record (although since they take place on the field and in public they legally aren't), but I'm going to violate that unwritten rule. Marszalek told his kids that there was nothing he could say that would make them feel any better about the outcome of the game.
"But today we stood up for what is right," he said. "And in the coming weeks that will help us. Maybe not as a football team, but it will help all of us in life knowing that people are supposed to do what is right."
I think that's called being a role model. And I know it's right.
