Who would guess that this scene was the result of a school argument regarding whether or not student athletes could compete while having long hair?
At the beginning of the 1969 school year, the athletic department met to discuss the rules for the upcoming sports seasons. During the meeting, Bob Troppman, athletic director and head football coach at the time, called for a vote on whether hair length could be restricted for sports’ teams. The suggested rule said that hair shouldn’t come over the collar or the ears.
According to Troppmann, there was an overwhelming vote for the restriction.
Then came track season, when several students didn’t want to get haircuts.
According to Doug Basham, track and cross country coach at the time, some students wore their hair long to display their views on the Vietnam War.
“It always seemed as though the people that were pro Vietnam War were always the militarists who always had short hair, and those that were not were sort of the ones that were described as hippies or some sort,” Basham said recently. “It’s never that black and white, but that’s the way it became.”
Basham chose to back up his track athletes, who wanted to wear longer hair than the rules allowed.
“It’s fine if the baseball coaches wanted short hair and if the football coaches wanted short hair,” Basham said. “Let them do it. I just didn’t see a reason for it.”
Nonetheless, five athletes were not allowed to participate in track due to the fact that they would not follow the rules.
The students then went to the school board. Seven hundred community members attended a board meeting in the gym to debate the issue over hair, on both sides.
After hearing all of the debate and questions, the board voted 3-2 in favor of keeping the short hair policy.
Two of the runners took their case to court, saying that their personal rights had been violated. The students sued the Tamalpais Union High School District for $50,000, Troppmann said in a recent interview.
Basham and lawyers backed up the students. In 1970, the case was brought to the district court in San Francisco as Neuhaus v. The Tamalpais Union High School District.
“There was this doctor, the one doctor who checked all physicals for our district, who testified in district court on the school district’s side,” Basham said. “He testified that the reason you would not want to have people with long hair running is that they would not be able to see well and would run into telephone poles and street signs. Boy, you talk about just looking for arguments.”
When the testimonies were finished, the judge ruled in favor of the athletic department, saying they could determine whatever rules they want.
However, according to Basham, the district eventually allowed coaches to set standards for their own teams.
Basham said he was not asked to come back to coach the next year. Troppman later resigned after the superintendent’s intervention.
“It was the discipline more than anything else,” Troppmann said. “When they first opened, Redwood was very disciplined. They felt that I just wasn’t with the times. I had been a Marine, and some of the coaches didn’t want to go along with the Marine philosophy.”
In the meantime, a former Air Force colonel was hired as the new track coach.
“He was one of the real adamant ones against long hair,” Basham said. “So one of the kids with long hair went to get on the bus to run, and he didn’t let him, because he didn’t get his physical clearance. However, the coach wouldn’t give this guy a paper to go get the physical clearance until he cut his hair.”
The athlete went to the principal, who fired both of the track coaches. When Basham came back from his leave, he was rehired to coach track and cross country.
“Never had any problems after that,” Basham said. “The baseball coach still always mandated really short hair. It had to be above the ear and all that. The football team still did that too.“
During Basham’s leave of absence, one of the protestors of the hair length restriction decided to step in a race.
“The coach, being such a violent anti-hair guy, ran out and tackled him off the course,” Basham said. “The kid wanted to just get his chance to run, and he didn’t.”
Basham recalled a lot of violence related to the hair controversy.
“Kids were beating up on kids who had long hair at parties,” he said. “It was just craziness.”
