COVINGTON, Ky. -- The basketball game between Covington Catholic High School and Holmes High School has been postponed due to “passions running high relating to the incident in Washington, D.C.,” Holmes posted on its website.
The basketball game had been scheduled to take place Friday, but officials from both schools decided to postpone the game after a CovCath student became a subject in a viral video last weekend.
Holmes High School posted the following statement on its website:
“The Friday evening basketball game between Holmes High School and Covington Catholic High School has been canceled and will be played at a later date.
“With passions running high relating to the incident in Washington, D.C. this past weekend, officials from both schools agreed that it would be best to postpone the game.
“The teams are looking at their schedules to determine a new date.We will announce the date and time of the game as soon as it is determined.”
CovCath student Nicholas Sandmann Sandmann traveled with classmates to Washington, D.C., to participate in Saturday's March for Life. The group was filmed later that day outside the Lincoln Memorial, where bellicose members of a fringe religious movement called the Black Hebrew Israelites began insulting them as well as nearby Native American activists participating in the Indigenous Peoples March for the rights of native communities.
The students and the Black Hebrew Israelites exchanged chants. The Native American activists, among them Omaha tribe elder Nathan Phillips, entered the crowd in what Phillips described as an effort to defuse the mounting confrontation. He played a traditional drum and sang as he walked through the Covington group.
It was at this point Sandmann, wearing a "Make America Great Again" cap, was recorded smiling and standing less than a foot from Phillips' face while he continued to sing.
Sandmann’s family has since contracted Kentucky’s largest public relations firm and a Georgia attorney known for aggressive libel and slander suits against media organizations.
