A junior varsity football coach given a suspension for making his players lie down in a central New York cemetery attempting to motivate his players after a defeat, said he borrowed the idea from a pivotal scene in the 2000 Denzel Washington film “Remember the Titans.”

The superintendent of the Marcellus school district, Craig Tice, outside Syracuse, announced Thursday that coach Jim Marsh has been given a 2 week suspension without pay for last weekend’s spur-of-the-moment stop at a rural cemetery.

Marsh’s team was going back home from a loss last Saturday at neighboring Skaneateles when he had the bus pull over at a cemetery and told the 24 players to lie down between rows of graves. The coach then gave them a speech about the importance of playing hard.

Tice stated that some of the players, who were still in uniform, laid down on top of graves at St. Francis Xavier cemetery, close to the Marcellus school campus 12 miles southwest of Syracuse. Some parents gave a complaint to school officials after being told by the players what had happened.

Marsh gave an apology during a meeting with players and their parents at the school Thursday night, telling them he was attempting to inspire the team by recreating a scene from “Remember the Titans,” which told the story of a newly integrated Virginia high school’s football team in 1971, with Denzel portraying the head coach.

During a scene set at the team’s preseason camp at Pennsylvania’s Gettysburg College, the players stop to rest in a fog-shrouded Civil War graveyard during a training run. Washington’s character uses the graveyard atomosphere to tell his players, black and white, to “take a lesson from the dead” and start playing together as a team or face defeat.

Marsh offered to give his resignation as coach but Tice said he refused to accept it.

Tice gave a descripton of Marsh as a well-liked and highly regarded teacher and coach in Marcellus. Marsh was teaching classes Friday and was not available for comment, Tice stated.

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