A high school principal who was inducted into the Oklahoma Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2022 now faces a year in jail after being charged with outraging public decency.
Authorities have been collecting accounts from players from the school’s football team that point to him cultivating a toxic environment for students.
The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation says Ringling High School principal and head football coach Phillip Koons created a “cult-like environment” that espoused toxic masculinity, homophobia, racism, and other forms of social and physical abuse.
His students and their parents’ complaints helped launch the investigation after Koons’ contract ended in February 2023. The Oklahoma State Department of Education placed the coach on a four-month administrative leave on Feb. 22, nine days after the local school board voted to renew Koons’ contract during a contentious public meeting, news station KFOR reports.
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As a result of Koons’ behavior, students and their parents secured legal representation, believing their civil rights had been infringed.
“These boys were subjected to a cult-like environment where this guy would groom them, break them down to where they were at a point that they wanted to quit playing football, some of them wanting to commit suicide, and then would build them back up within that cult system and create a deal where he was the most important thing in their lives,” Tod Mercer, a lawyer that represents one of the players, said in an interview with The Daily Beast.
“He would isolate them from their friends, from their family, even from their doctors,” the attorney said before adding that Black players on his team were especially disrespected.
Ringling, a town of approximately 1,600 people in southern Oklahoma, is less than 1 percent African-American, Census data shows.
According to Mercer, Koons called his players of African descent the N-word,…
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