The creepy crown phenomenon that’s spreading across the country has claimed a high school coach, who picked the wrong time to dust off his mask.
Ben Hildre was the freshman basketball and JV soccer coach at St. Francis High School in St. Francis, Minn. before he was abruptly fired Friday after a photo circulated of him in clown-face, at a time when clown sightings — and clown hoaxes — are gripping the country.
Hildre says he didn’t mean to stoke the clown craze in a town of just over 7,000 people. He was just honoring his own last-soccer-practice Halloween tradition, in which he dresses up and the team hits a pinata. According to Fox 9, his gorilla costume was damaged, so he grabbed the mask Wednesday unaware of the clown-terror craze.
“I just drove by, waved, practiced and went and took a picture by that garbage can,” Hildre told the news station. “I wasn’t trying to make light of a bad situation and bad judgment on my part for being naïve.”
The photo of Bozo popping out of the garbage can spiked on social media, eventually making its way to the district’s superintendent, brought to him by a concerned student.
“We all make mistakes and this was a big one,” said Independent School District 15 Superintendent Troy Ferguson. “Kids are scared, and it’s not OK for adults to be part of that to make kids scared.”
The news hit Hildre like a pie in the face.
“This is my life, and it just gets me here,” he said, pointing to his heart.
Hildre — and the girls who played on his team, who unwittingly spread the photograph around — is now frantically trying to get the decision reversed. Several of his team’s players and their parents spoke at a school board meeting Monday, according to USA Today, to get back the unpaid volunteer coach, who isn’t a teacher at the school.
So far, no further decision has been made. According to the report, the superintendent would be open to the coach’s return next year, but has maintained that Hildre will not be coaching basketball over the winter.